pop's chair

Calendars and the Passing of Time

I have admired my friend Melinda Green Harvey’s wit and writing since we first met in Toastmasters 20 years ago.  We share an avid interest in photography and often laugh at “channeling” each other when we shoot a similar subject or location.  Our other “parallel points” include the loss of a mother and coping with an eighty-plus year old father.  Recently Melinda has been dealing with her dad in an assisted living center and the chore of closing a childhood home.  She is sharing these thoughts in a photoessay entitled “to be sold to strangers.”  A recent entry  featured calendars and this post prompted another of our “connections.”  Melinda described the home occupied since 1964 as a time capsule.  Pop’s only lived in this house for 30 years and, instead of  museum quality, it is frozen in time since 1999.  Rather rattling around in the large house alone, Daddy has made his living quarters in the master bedroom—moving in his recliner, the television and a side-table for the remote, medicines, mail and magnifying glass.  Mother would have been appalled, but when Pop, for Christmas, received a photo calendar of great-grandson namesake William, he thumbtacked it right there on the wall within easy viewing range.  The calendar in the utility room is for birthdays and doctor appointments; the calendar in the bathroom, at year’s end, will join its previous years counterparts on the dusty shelf.  This decade or so of calendars chronicle daily handwritten entries of farm history – dates for planting, amount of rainfall, starting the pivot, harvest yields – an annual Fortenberry Farmer’s Almanac.