52 Photos ~ On my way

Almost every week, this photo project puts a song in my head.

This week’s song is one that parents with children of a certain age will remember from the movie “Ice Age,” which we watched approximately seven billion times when H was small. And which we all loved. And laughed at, especially when Scrat got squeezed between the cliff walls and his eyes filled like two huge balloons that threatened to pop out of his head. Oh, how we howled.

And cried at the goodbye at the end.

Don’t forget about us. We won’t forget about you.

I don’t remember the last time we watched that movie. Or “Finding Nemo,” which we quoted from daily for at least a year.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

Do you have your exit buddy?

No eating here tonight; you’re on a diet.

Or “Toy Story 2,” which H insisted that M tell her the plot of (in its entirety) as a bedtime story. Every night. For months. And so he got terribly good at shortening it, capturing all of the important events, whittling it down to something like 90 seconds. Until, at some point she no longer required that story.

But when was the last time?

We don’t record such things, mostly because we don’t know that it’s the last. I think about that a lot. About last times that I didn’t recognize. The last time I took a walk in the valley with our old dog, Phoebe. The last time I carried H. The last time I looked in my mother’s eyes.

Maybe it’s better that way. Not to have to grieve every last event, knowing it would be the last, but to move blithely on to the next, to firsts that we also don’t recognize as firsts.

That view above is one of many stunning outlooks on the way from our house to H’s school. We get to see it when the morning sun is just cresting the ridge, and in full-sun afternoons, and everything in between. This time of year, the sunlight slants in weakly, under the clouds, to make the mountainsides appear velveted. Hushed. Swept clean and ready for snowfall.

H has seen that view, coming and going, every school day since she was in preschool at the top of Thetford Hill.

“I remember when all this was fields,” she’ll someday tell a friend or a sweetheart, when she returns here from wherever her adult life takes her. Uncounted lasts behind her, glorious firsts ahead.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.