family photos

The Marine’s Letters Make It Home

| Flower Roberts

My sister and I met Louis’s daughter and grandson for lunch yesterday. Both of them resemble him. I felt relief to finally hand over this important part of their dad and grandfather’s history to his family.


They left us to take the notebook to share with her daughter, Louis’s grandaughter. Today, they will share the letters with his widow, Linda. Then take them home for her brother and mother to read.

Louis’s grandson and daughter.

The circle can be completed without me. I have done my part to make it happen. I did this for my mother, who saved the letters for over sixty years.

Dottie

I did it for a young, lonely marine who wrote so beautifully about his first years in the military and service overseas and then came back to a different world.

Louis in 1950

Most of all, I did it out of respect for first loves. When hearts do what they do without reserve, fear or reason. Before things get guarded, complicated and weighted.

The story of Dottie and Louis is sweet. I am not sure how or why it ended. We got conflicting stories from mama due to dementia. My mom went on to marry my wonderful father. They stayed together over sixty years until his death in 2020.

But that’s another story.

FLOW

Daddy’s 5,840 Slides

| Flower Roberts

I got the neighbor’s children to help move all the boxes of slides and the three projectors to one place in the basement. I was tired of looking at them every day. They have been downstairs for months now. I am finally strong enough to go down the steps. I went down yesterday to look and take photos. I need to know what is ahead of me.

The slide closet in the basement.

Each box with a reel in it potentially holds 140 slides. There are 41 reel boxes and a shoe box of little boxes and random letters. That means there could be 5,840 slides.

Three projectors and more slides.

My sister and I purged hundreds of inherited slides when we emptied our parents’ house. These inherited slides were mostly of people we did not know in places we had not been. There were even hundreds of double slides and a binocular stereoscope viewer. At first we were careful and respectful in our purging. By the end we were thinking these folks were self-absorbed and took way too many photos of their dog and cat.

My plan is to purge and color-code these thousands of slides while I am snowed in this winter. I will keep a fire going in Daddy’s big stove as I sort through sixty years of slides. This sounds like a great way to spend snowy days. Mr. Flower bought me a lovely blue Lodge pan for cooking on the stove if there is a power outage. Daddy would have loved that.

I have done some sorting before when old friends were coming to stay here on the mountain. We hiked Grandfather Mountain with this family in our younger years. We made a slide show just for them. Their color was purple.

It was a wonderful visit. The last before my parents passed. We suspected such and wanted it to be perfect.

I am determined not to leave this purging task for my children to tackle. I will confess that the inheritance of stuff has changed the course of my life. I do not want my two children to be overwhelmed by what I leave behind. They have too much stuff of their own right now.

I will bravely tackle this task for the sake of the family that follows, so they won’t have to wonder,  ‘”Who are these folks? Where are they? and ” Who is that spoiled beagle in all these photos?”

FLOWER and the slides