How to Make Memories When the World Stops by Shelly Blankman (HOW TO Series)

How to Make Memories When the World Stops
by Shelly Blankman

Memory books line my shelves with pages of life
in pictures . . . moments in time that might otherwise
fade — photos, tickets, programs, awards.

But what happens when the world halts? When
pages of time have no record of trips, outings,
holidays, family gatherings. Nothing to capture

on film. This was my new challenge. Not the materials.
Special glues and pens, papers and stickers. I had
those. But how I do I fashion fond memories from dreary

days that blur, seasons that vanish like steam from windows,
quiet moments that fill our time where noise and color used
to be? Life as we knew it could only be pieced together like

the puzzle of a world that had fallen apart. Personal pictures
that could only be replaced now by snippets of time —
news clippings of Black lives that mattered and a new president

who would matter, too. Screenshots of Scattergories on Zoom
with our kids, now quarantined in Texas and New York, their
laughter echoing in our own living room. A screenshot of my

my husband, tallit on shoulders, yarmulke on head, cat by his side,
leading Shabbat services on Zoom with a congregation no longer
able to pray and sing side by side. And Zoom dinners with friends

and family, on-line toasts to a time when we could clink our glasses
to a future of a world of hugs and hope. A time when my scrapbook
can be filled with festive memories of travels and family gatherings.

New memories for a world reclaimed

PHOTO ART: Heart if home by Holly Lay (Polaroid emulsion on glass and mixed media).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shelly Blankman lives in Columbia, Maryland. She and her husband are currently quarantined there from two sons: Richard of New York City, and Joshua of San Antonio, Texas. Richard and Joshua surprised her last year with her first book of poetry,  Pumpkinhea  (available on Amazon). Her work has also appeared in a number publications, including Literary Review-East, Ekphrastic Review, and Verse-Virtual. 

haiku by Patricia McGoldrick (MY PRIZED POSSESSION Poetry & Prose Series)

haiku
by Patricia McGoldrick

green jardinière
molded with plant motifs
Victorian gem

© 2016 by Patricia McGoldrick

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This plant holder, jardinière, has passed though several generations. It is a precious link to my mother’s ancestors who came from Ireland over a century ago. It has survived through travels, moving, and many children’s growing years! I treasure this piece from the past, truly a prized possession!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Patricia McGoldrick is a Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, poet and writer, inspired by the everyday. She is a member of The Ontario Poetry Society and the League of Canadian Poets. Recent publications include the poems “Limerick on Laundry” and “haiku on home” in Verse Afire print issues; online titles are posted at commuterlit.com and in Red Wolf Journal you’ll find her poem “Urban Upcycling.” Visit her website or find her Twitter @pmgoldrick27.

Found Photos Post-Hurricane Sandy by Dan Barry, NY Times

STORM TOSSED MEMORIES

by Dan Barry, New York Times, 11/17/12

If you take a walk along the altered coast these days, you will find snapshots and photographs everywhere, scattered like leaves shaken from family trees. Here, a wedding pose. There, a baptism scene. Just beyond, the moment that a shirtless man on a chaise longue laughed into the sun.

Freeze-frame pieces of private lives, they were once displayed on a bookshelf, or pinned to a corkboard or kept safe and secret in a box under the bed. Then Sandy, the storm whose casual name belied its fury, swept these moments up and left them in the sand and muck of places like Great Kills Park, where a part of Staten Island now uneasily meets the sea.

Some of the rain-damaged photos look like the sweetest kindergarten art project, with grit and leaves adhered to damp squares and rectangles. Some look psychedelic, with the human and the inanimate swirling into one. Each photograph has become a new kind of memento: an image of one moment redefined by another.

If this open-air photo exhibition has a theme, perhaps it is that nature’s dominion makes precious all things — not the photograph, but the living moment it all too inadequately has captured.

The time we went to Coney Island to ride the Cyclone. The time we gazed into the fresh-seeing eyes of a newborn. The time we traveled to a place so foreign that we simply had to photograph the sign: Welcome to Montana.

All these bits of time have been scratched, blurred, transformed. That red convertible we were so proud of looks as though it is about to be struck by a meteor. And every moment — the prom, the dance recital, the snowman’s construction — is painted now with bright yellows and rich reds and burnt oranges, the colors of our storm-tossed autumn.

PHOTO: Found photo, post-Hurricane Sandy, Staten Island, NY. Find a gallery of found photos at the New York Times website.