The mirror of the past

All this snow and ice has me housebound. The plow guy was MIA until noon after the storm. I came to fully appreciate how wimpy I have become when walked K2 to a playdate friend up the hill. Gee, this snow is deep. Didn't look so deep from the cozy warm front window... Even the cats recoil from the cold that blasts in the door and and they scurry away with pinched faces.

In this forced holding pattern, I had a rare gift. Hubby has been in one of his mad digital conversion fits. His goal is to convert every tape, slide, film, or other "ancient" media form into a library of digital files for posterity or who ever gets a kick out of it. I have had two reel to reel tapes since forever that my mom gave me. They were labelled cryptically in German with dates of 1960 and 1970.

So on my desk was a bright shiny new CD with mp3 files of ancient history. It took a little fiddling with volume and headphones to fully get it, but suddenly I was hearing my mother's voice. Much thinner, much younger. Then my father's. Talking to the tape which was to be sent to my mother's mother in Germany. They talked of their new town and church, of the friendly people, how things compared with their home. They talked of Kennedy's election over Nixon. I heard my mother giggle with the barely suppressed news that she was pregnant with the child before me, who would die in infancy.

The last segment she spoke to her sister in 1970. She rejoiced in having a rare afternoon to herself without the interruption of children. She was explaining the current stresses of her life- inflation, layoffs, kids turning to drugs. She mentioned each of us and where we were and what we looked like. All of our good qualities she praised. My father's work and the perilous position he was in with waves of layoffs. She was taking college courses to get her teaching certificate and the mother-juggling she had to do to get that all done and all of us taken care of.

Then she said that what she missed the most was talking to her mother. How different it felt to make decisions alone with out her counsel. I heard my own voice in hers. Funny that I just told the sky last night that I missed her. It almost seemed that she was answering, 'I know, I was where you are once. It is the way of things.'

All this almost two hours of non-stop talking was in German and I understood it all as if I were still there lying on the rug of our living room in the house where I began. The language I thought I had forgotten was not even noticeable to me any more.

Our minds are amazing things.