Unable to spend time away from home these days, finding simple mindless jobs around the house to occupy my time while making me feel that I’m accomplishing something worthwhile, I sat on the foyer floor gathering pictures around me. The plan at the time was to organize thirty years of memory–if you take it back to childhood, over fifty memory years. That simple comment makes me want to laugh (ROFLOL, as said on Facebook). Organizing photographs is something I don’t believe to be possible for me but I keep trying, year after year, to do just that, giving up within an hour because there are simply too many pictures of too many people and I can’t remember who they are or when they were, or even where I knew them. When you’ve moved around as much as I have moved around, it seems you meet the same people in every state, city, church, workplace, that you met in the last state, city, church, workplace. And, so, you know you knew them–very well, indeed–but who they were in reality is a mystery to hold attention at least five minutes until you realize they’re probably dead or you didn’t “know” them after all if you can’t remember them now. I always put those pictures in a ‘throw-away’ pile, to put them back in the picture jumble box when I’m ‘finished’ because I can’t throw away a picture. It feels as if I’m throwing away a person and, if I have that person’s picture, I had to have known him or her well enough to want a picture. Sad not to remember a life that touched my life in some way … maybe (I convince myself) I was changed in some good way by this person. Surely, that’s true.

What I found this time, though, was a psychological issue, which is often what I find in doing most anything–washing the dishes by hand instead of letting the dishwasher do my dirty work, kicking a tiny rock off the driveway as I head back into the house from the mailbox, then affixing a troubled mind on how that rock got on my driveway–thrown or dropped from plane?

Countless photographs were of people with their backs to the camera, meaning backs to me since I held the camera, pointed it, and clicked. I don’t know what it is that makes me do this, but I have so many photographs taken with people walking away from me … adults, children, men, women, it makes no difference; they are walking away. Even my daughters on their horses–always heading away from me. Wondering about me and about the reasons I do what I do–mainly because I stay pretty confused even at this ancient age as to why I am as I am, have always been as I am and I imagine will finish up this earthly life exactly as I’ve always been–I stopped shuffling pictures to consider the why of that.

I don’t enjoy it when people walk away from me; it isn’t something I think perfect for pictures. There’s a feeling connected with a back turned to me, a ‘not noticing’ of me, or feet heading away from me, that connects me with reality tinged with passionate loss. And loss gets to me, digs into my emotions and eats away at my feelings. I realized that loss is something I’ve come to expect … in you, in friendships, in loved ones … a chosen loss by others, not instigated by me, though I’m sure I do that well.

Are those pictures my belief that this person will one day turn around and walk away from me? Or, did I just miss the chance to get a good smile by being too slow on the trigger. Which, then, reminds me of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.  Why? I do not know. I just always loved them … Happy trails to you …

If you think emotionally about it, a person coming toward you is ecstasy! A person walking away from you is passion!  By jove, I think I’ve got it!!