The Picture on the Wall

I am a youngin’. A spring chicken, if you will.

The world is my oyster and I am ripe for the pickin’. I have never been more ready to go tha
I am right at this very moment and let’s go, time’s a-wastin’, let’s move people.

It’s just that there’s this picture on my wall.

And it stops me whenever I pass it, which is often.

It’s black and white and it’s perfectly centered on eight smiling couples gathered on a big, stone hearth in a Longhouse Cabin that sits on the shore of Algonquin’s Long Lake.

This is where my family spent summer’s lazy days.

Each person in the picture is wearing some combination of waist-tied, patterned wind-breaker and khaki pair of trousers and perfectly circular tortoise shell eye-glasses and at the time, they seemed old to me—very old. They did things old people do and said things old people say and acted they way old people act.

None of it made sense, really, to my ten-year-old mind—the gathering and the chatting and the sunbathing and the cocktail-ing.

They were just so old.

In the mornings we young kids washed our locks in the lake and gasped and giggled as the fish tickled our feet and those old folks would say, “your hair will never be as soft as it is when you wash it in the lake,” even though they’d said it a thousand times before.

In the afternoons, we would laugh and explore and play ping-pong and checkers and backgammon on faded game boards that smelled perfectly of memories while the old folks bathed in the hot sun and talked their serious talk for hours on end. And when we didn’t think they could possibly have anything more to say, they would talk some more.

In the evenings, we joyfully performed songs and plays by the light of the fire while they–the ones still tired from hours of driving their families into the back roads of Canada amongst bickering and bathroom breaks–gathered on the hearth for a group photograph to commemorate a moment in time. It was a moment that embodied everything a parent could want for their kid.

That’s the very picture that now hangs on my wall. And it stops me every time I pass it because, now, I get it.

You see—today, I’m the same age as those old folks were when they gathered on the hearth to capture a memory on Kodachrome and I’m not sure when it happened, but boy did it happen fast.

In an instant, I became the grown up, the parent and even though I so vividly remember being that 10-year-old who explored and played and laughed, somehow overnight it all flew by and I became an adult. And, now, here I am in the midst of my own very grown-up life–among the chaos and the activities and the hustle of the bustling schedules of three children and I often forget to just hold on for a moment.

But, this summer when my kids are tired from a full day of swimming and are playing scrabble in their sun-dried bathing suits with wind-blown hair, I will pass by that very picture and I will stop.

I’ll look at the smiling faces in black and white, and then I’ll look at my peaceful kids, and I’ll appreciate a moment when everything is just right.