Bloganuary: What is a treasure that’s been lost?
There are so many things you could say about this prompt (from the very personal to the very controversial), but for me, what hits home is the stories I’ve lost with my mother’s death.
When my sister and I were sorting through some of my mom’s things, we found so many items that astonished us. My mom was the last of her generation in our immediate family. So there’s no one left to ask when questions arise: Who are the people in this photo? Where did these art prints come from? Where did you get this keepsake?
What’s doubly confounding is I want answers to questions I never thought to ask when my mom was alive, like the story behind this advertisement.
This is one of the things my sister and I unearthed while searching for mementos and photos for my mother’s memorial (you can click to enlarge the text).
And seriously? What on earth? How did my parents end up featured in the Seattle Times classified section? Also, the conventions of the era? Their address? Really? Why? In case random strangers wanted to drop by?
Still, this little slice of their life is delightful, even without the context around it. I’ll never have the complete picture, but I can pull some of the puzzle pieces together.
Writing Wrongs 
What an amazing discovery to make — that ad cracked me up! And, yes, it’s hard when we stumble upon the stories we realize we’ll never have the chance to know… leaving us to conjecture, presume, and make up stories of our own.