When I took Mum’s many knickknacks and photos down to clean the living room (because I had *cough* accidentally *cough* gotten dust everywhere), I suggested that she may want to re-evaluate and be selective with which ones she puts back up on display. For instance, the recent family photo of us on the wall is more than adequate – she needn’t have individual frames of our children’s school pictures from ten years ago up too. Or her married granddaughter’s kindergarten photo. Or the toy car her adult grandson gave her when he was a toddler. Or the jar of pickled bums gag gift someone gave her two Christmases ago….

I mentioned how Doc and I are determined to resist the urge to fill up blank spaces in our new home, and just put out the things that have particularly strong meaning for us and that we enjoy, so they can be showcased and have a place of honour instead of being lost among a ton of other, somewhat less significant, items.

But… that’s just us, of course. Ahem.

My mother, bless her heart, is no fool. And she’ll tell me when I’ve crossed the line and offended her. The line seems to have moved tremendously over the years, and it frequently surprises (and sometimes even frightens) me how much I get away with saying.

So with her agreement, I took down the large but ragtag collection of photos and removed them all from their mismatched, and often broken, frames. Meanwhile, she dragged dusty boxes of snapshots out of closets, and we’ve been sorting them all out ever since, with pleas from me for her to write names of people on the backs of the photos I don’t know. Somewhat daunted at the size of this Pandora’s box we’ve opened, we’ve agreed to ignore the photos in albums for the moment.

What has resulted is “a bloomin’ mess!” all over her living room carpet. Five piles of photos and memorabilia (old school papers, ribbons, etc) – one for each of us kids. Then there’s another pile of miscellaneous family group shots, most taken at assorted Christmases, with furniture cleared away and tables shoved together in the old farm kitchen to make room for our large family and several neighbouring families as well. A large pile is photos from the first few years just after my parents and two brothers immigrated to Canada, as they were taking many pictures of their new life and sending them back to Scotland. By far, the largest, and tipsiest pile, is one labelled “scenery”. How many faded amateur pictures does a family realistically need of the Rocky Mountains? These will end up stuffed back into the bottom of a box “to sort through and throw out some day”. It’s piles like that that, in the past, had discouraged and derailed Mom from this task before she got very far.

But what is most exciting, but also draining, for me are the piles of photos I had absolutely no idea my parents had, and probably never would’ve known if I hadn’t nudged her into this project. A bundle of irreplaceable old black and whites from my father’s army days show glimpses of his everyday life in Germany, and his buddies. A much smaller but surprising pile of photos revealed my parents in their “courting days”, as well as my maternal grandparents in THEIR “courting days”… images I was led to believe didn’t exist! And one particularly rare photo – my father at a town dance, about 16 or 17 years old, grinning with his mates and pretty girls sitting on their laps. As far as we know, this is the only photo there is of my dad before he met my mother.

It’s been like looking through a treasure chest. Not just of photos, but of rare truths and raw emotions – something that isn’t traditionally allowed to surface in my parents’ generation and culture. As we sort through the images with the goal of organizing them and picking out the cream of the crop for future scrapbooks and display frames, Mom has been telling me many interesting stories about the people in the photos – my kin.

At one point we realized it was getting harder to see, and were shocked to look at the clock and find that the day had slipped away and we’d been at it for more than eight hours. My mother started apologizing profusely to me. For what? I demanded. For it taking so long, for me doing so much, for not noticing it had gotten dark, for not having supper made, for….

I swear, if I stubbed my toe in Alberta and my mother heard about it, she’d probably try to take the blame for that as well!

Whenever she does this – whenever she expresses concern about my health, about me doing “too much”, about me not resting enough, etc, etc – it’s all I can do not to scream. The woman is 80 years old and has seen more hardship and grief in her life than I could ever fathom, but she has spent a large portion of her days since I got here thanking me profusely for any odd wee job I do and scolding me for not lazing about and having a holiday.

Boy, have things ever changed.