"Daddy, who is this?" asked the young girl while looking through some old photos in the attic. She held a picture of the past. It was of an old woman, cold and sad. With the cardboard background gray like her eyes and the frown on her face wrinkled, she struggled to look back into her memory in order to make a resemblance. She thought hard. Nothing. Her father immediately made the connection. He knew just by
looking at the bare back of the photo as his daughter scrutinize the picture. Its as if he lived the old woman's life for her because her
knew her idealized past better than she did. With only the two dimensions of the photo, suddenly the old sad woman came to life in Jeffery head. " This is your great uncles wife." He said expecting her not to understand." She thought long and hard and then gave a sigh of reassurance. Jeffery remembered all the days when his great uncle baby sat him while his mother and father went to work and that is when this old sad woman came to life. "She was only 69 years old when in that picture, but the disease made her look 100." Jeffery recited this in his head as if his great uncle were still there today telling him. He took the picture from his daughters hands and began to pour out and dust off his brains images of the past that had long been neglected. "Her name was Margret and she loved horses" He starter. "She loved the color yellow and more appropriately she loved sunflowers. Her life was hard. Her and her husband had no children together except for one son from Philips previous marriage. She miscarried 4 times. She never
could really discard the pain it gave her. The later on she was
diagnosed with colon cancer and the doctors didn't give her much time
to live. She loved sitting my the fire with your great uncle and knit
child's clothing for the children that she eventually never had." The
father looked up to see a bug eyes little girl staring back at him.
She had been hooked and there was no stopping her. With her legs in
criss-cross apple sauce and her arms laying heavily on top of them,
the child's eyes begged for more. More images, more information, more
of anything that tied her into this old woman's life. You could do
nothing but feel sad for this woman with sadness scared on her face.
Fearing for the young girls sanity Jeffery reconsidered continuing
with his recollection of the past. "Your know what, It getting late
you should probably go to bed. You have school in the morning." She
put up a fight but eventually carried her disappointed weight to bed leaving her father alone in the attic to reminisce. He looked at the picture and saw the dirty finger print from his uncle. He always touched her face as if it was not just a picture but a living thing. Jeffery remembered the tears that would fall on the picture from his uncle whenever her would start his routine of bringing her back from the grave everyday. He remembers trying to ignore the sadness that he could see his uncle trying oh so desperately to hide. "We loved each other so much." He would always say, and "She was such an amazing woman." Jeffery remembered that her favorite food was French toast. Thinking so hard, Jeffrey's mouth started to water with nothing to satisfy his appetite but the thick dust in the old, stale air. He tucked the picture away in the old shoe box along with the other lost memories and on his way out stumbled across a picture of his uncle. Gray yet filled with life the photograph started to speaking to him in
commemoration. With tears forming in his eyes they fell one by one
warping the old fabrication of the photograph. Jeffrey tucked it away
and closed the lid leaving all the memorabilia inside. As he walked
down the old wooden latter and clicked off the light her whispered to himself "He was only 75 years old in that picture but living without Margret made him look 100."