Short Movies in my mind

 

My mind seems to be reflecting back today like watching a movie rerun of many short films. Some are slow playing and then they seem to start playing really fast like a blur going by.

I can see myself, clearly in my mind at the age of ten, swinging in the old porch swing at my grandparent’s house, sitting beside my Pap as he whittles on an old stick he found in the yard. Time was slow and simple as we swung, not talking but just listening to the sounds around us. Children playing outside, birds singing in the trees. It was so peaceful there.

My thoughts switch quickly through my childhood to the day I met my husband at a summer camp in Texas. I was only fifteen and I had a crush on him from the first day I met him. I would sign up for a trail ride that he led around the camp each day just to get to talk to him. Five years later that school girl crush was the start of a path God had already planned for our lives.  I still see so clearly the very day we married at his sister’s home. The wedding cake she made for us, the blue dress his niece loaned me, and both of us standing in the living room saying our vowels from the book of Ruth. The movie starts getting faster now as I can see the birth of our daughter’s being born. I can see the day of their first steps, their first tooth, the day they started school. Then it fast forwards quicky to the day they leave our home and get married.

I can see the first day I met each grandchild, holding them in my arms and feeling so much love that I though my heart would burst. They each flash by in my mind very quickly all at once. I can see them playing, starting school, smiles on their little faces as they opened gifts from Christmas and Birthdays. I can hear the giggles as they played. Then my mind plays many funerals we attended and many tears shed. Some play over and over…  I want to scream stop, slow down, I don’t want to stop watching them… but the short movies in my head start getting faster and faster and skipping many years and minutes like the film is beginning to break. 

Time, months, years have all slowed down in our life now like a grandfather clock about to wind down. The days start the same. There’s no set time to awake in the mornings and some days there’s no reason to even leave the house. We repeat the same things each day with the same chores around the house and yard. The same are watched on the TV. The same meals cooked. The same monthly trips made to pick up prescriptions and groceries and feed for the horse. The same bedtime routine. Weeks turning into days and the days all running together, faster and faster even thou time seems like slow motion.  I guess that’s why I don’t mind when those short films in my mind keep me awake for hours in the middle of the night or when I’m reminded of a past memory.

I don’t know how many of those movies in my mind that I will remember to play over and over again before they fade away. Some have already faded and some are hidden deep in my mind waiting to be switched on again.