Time Like Pretzel Dough

Faces flow past my eyes like leaves on a breeze. In the last week I've scanned several hundred scanning beds worth of family pictures stretching back from the present to my great great grandparents generation. A 'scanning bed' means whatever fits on the scanners surface which will hold a single 8x11 or two 5x7 and so forth.

The pictures above and below these paragraphs are of the family of my mother's father's mother before her marriage. The back of some of the pictures are stamped with the info of a photagrapher's studio in Elkhart Indiana. The picture in the lower right corner above is not of family. It is a photo of artwork depicting Pharoah's daughter discovering the infant Moses. It was in the antique album in which these photos were displayed and probably a stock photo for demo purposes. I've taken pictures of that album and may post them at a later time.

Also in that album was this sheet of paper with family tree info in my Mother's handwritting. I've scanned several similar sheets I've come across and occassionally scan the backs of the photos. But there are way too many with no info written on the back and there is nobody still living who knows who these people were. The two last names associated with these photos are Shutts and Wood. Grace Ella Shutts married Amos Myers and one of their sons was Howard who was my mother's father.
The picture below was also a single scan as it was an 8x10. The young couple pictures are my Dad's parents before they had children.
The bulk of my scanning today though was of my sister's birth thru graduation and then her son's birth thru the present. Yesterday it was my parent's wedding album and several albums ranging from around the time I was in high school through the present. One day last week I finished up the box featuring my life from birth thru marriage and also my wedding album.

The images go with me into dreams. The time line carried in my head feels stretched and knotted like pretzel dough.

I've still got several hundred pictures I would like to get to this week. Included are my mother's childhood, my father's childhood and the early years of my parents marriage and some miscellaneous loose pictures from their years of raising their three kids and their ward.

The scanner is set up next to my lap top desk which is beside the bed in the room I'm sharing with my Mom so I have to stop scanning when she comes to bed around nine-thiry.

Meanwhile I continue to crochet one or two bookmarks per day. As well as plug away at packing whatever items I think I'm not going to need between now and Sunday. It is strange to imagine that a week from this moment I will have been home for two days. After being away for six months that feels less real than the images in the pictures I've handled this week.