The joy is the JOURNEY,

the reward is the destination.

07.25.21-Going down memory lane with Carla
This would not be the first time we’ve travelled this route, but each time enlightens me on her early years. Below is her sister Mary Ann Ozdarski with Mary Ann’s new family addition “Frenchie.”

Mary Ann, like many seniors fortunate enough to afford the lifestyle, spends winters in Florida and summers at her lakeside home in Derby, VT with Frenchie. Below we visit her parents grave site.

Of course I never had a chance to meet her parents, Chester and Mary. I don’t believe my being French would have made much of a difference since the family already had a little French blood sprinkled in it thanks to Uncle Harold.

The cemetery is just as quiet and peaceful as the pictures denote. We were not alone. Amazingly there were at least 2-3 cars with visitors here to visit grave sites as well. It’s a nice work of mercy to visit  and pay homage to those responsible for us being here. We will be doing the same in a few weeks as we will revisit my fathers grave site in Brockton, MA.

Above is Carla’s childhood home. I think she said her room was on the second floor over the front porch area in the picture. My home was a 3-decker that required my father’s attention literally every weekend. I did not mind that much, at least we had a chance to work together when I got a little older and was not in the way any more. I could have taken another thirty pictures as Carla reminisced on who lived where and which businesses were operating back then, that are now mere monuments to age gone by.

As witnessed by the monuments made of stone in the cemetery and wooden homes and buildings in town, all we can ever hope for is a witness like Carla to reincarnate, at least verbally, the lives, loves, parents and friends who once walked the grounds and worked and played in the homes that still remain as testimony to their presents once upon a time. Unfortunately for most of us, there’s only a memory factor of about fifty-years. After that time, your existence will cease.

If you would permit me to go to my digital pulpit for just a minute, but since it’s my blog I will do it anyway. For a long time, since my father’s death, I’ve always felt there was a link, mental or spiritual (whatever you please), that those who leave us have, with this world and us in general. It’s an accepted fact the HE knows all, those who will be remembered and all the others. In this respect my personal feeling is that if even one person remembers another, personally, the person who passed is forever tethered to this world until that last person having a personal memory of the person departed passes himself or herself. The stuff of man might live on in many ways, but the ones who are remembered, even one-hundred years from today even ever so faintly, live on here spiritually until that last person passes on as well. Remembering the dead, the departed, is a verbal memorialization of their existence and a badge of honor for the departed that someone still remembers their presence here on earth no matter how insignificant their history here might have been.  Thank you for indulging me.

More on this possibly when we revisit my father’s grave site.