J. ANNE

Throw back Thursday’s don’t get thrown back much better than this.  Technically speaking though, it isn’t my moment to throw back.  It is my parent’s moment.  The moment they became husband and wife.

I sat in my Grandmother’s front yard this last weekend that I was home in New Mexico.  She is 87 years old, and I wanted to capture some photographs of her and my Dad together while I was home.  They both obliged, as they always do.  So, we sat in her front yard, and I listened to them banter with one another.  They reminisced on my parent’s wedding day because earlier in the weekend I had almost begged Grunner, which is what we call her, to delve into her massive box of photographs in order to find the photos she took that day.  They are the only photos that exist from that day, and it has taken all of my 32 years to finally ask to see them.   And now, here they laid.  On the table in front of me, wrapped in nothing but a double twisted rubber band.  The stack is small, but yet so huge.  It represents the beginning of me.  My siblings.  My family.  That stack is the beginning of the legacy that I am trying to carry forward into my own children.  And I couldn’t help but stare at the precariously wrapped stack of photos, and the rubber band that held it all together.

My parents have been married for 38 years.  And that rubber band has more than likely been double wrapped around those photos for the same amount of time.  Had they been in anyone else’s care but Grunner’s, they would have been lost, damaged, and forever erased.  Why in the hell would she trust me to have them?  Because she knows.

She knows that this stack of thirty-eight year old polaroids mean the world to me, and there isn’t a better person she could have trusted in order to make sure that they are preserved for lifetimes to come.

Thank you for trusting me, Grunner.  I love you.  And to my parents… you guys were hot!

xo.