The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together. ~Erma Bombeck
Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one. ~Jane Howard
i am feeling all nostalgic tonight. i am planning to make some christmas gifts for a few members of my family, and to do that, I needed to go through old photos from when we were growing up. so I went through my old album.
my youngest sister, carla, lives in australia. it has been 2 years since the last time we saw her. during these last years, we did not hear from her so much, only sometimes an sms. then we convinced her to join facebook. now, almost every day, i pop in to her facebook profile, and leave her a quick message. and suddenly, she seems a little closer, and suddenly, i have been missing her so much more! she is my sister, but there is a 7 year difference. and now there is half a world difference too. i know almost nothing about her life. i do not know what her house looks like. i do not even know what her boyfriend looks like, we have never met him. i do not know what he does for a living, or, for that matter, what she is doing for a living lately.
all this is making me quite sad. family is so important, yet we seem to have so little of each other. we share all this history, all these stories, all these in-jokes. we share blonde-ish hair and blue eyes, and in the case of my family, we even share the same middle name! we all share the name aalbert, named after some great uncle on my father’s side. in times of crisis and death and illness, we all pull together, and cry together. but in the ‘good’ times, all we have is a daily message on our facebook funwalls. and aging photos in our albums.
this is what makes scrapbooking so special. as I was planning a christmas gift, I looked back on ‘long ago’. and as I was scanning those old photos, I got 10 more ideas! Digital photos are so great, we can scan them and edit them and move them into folders, and use them over and over in different projects. we can scrap pages of ‘then and now’ of one person. we can do ‘father and son’ at the same age. we can commemorate facial expressions or temper tantrums, prizegivings and birthdays. we can edit and crop and enhance and improve, until each layout celebrates those amazing and special memories. and then we can get nostalgic and sad, and we can remember that everything starts and ends with family. and we can know that no matter what, we have each other.
as I am getting ready to go to bed, I am missing carla again. but I appreciate once again those very special people, my parents, paula, andre and carla, with whom I share such a very special history. and I know that no matter how many miles separate us and how little we see each other, we all carry a little of US all inside our hearts, and in our dna, and in our memories and in our characters. and that is the biggest blessing of all.
Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted. ~Paul Pearshall
