These socks are 51 years old. So is every piece of clothing and item beneath it. How do I know? They were the items I wore coming home from the hospital 3 months after I came into this world. They were doll clothes made by my paternal grandmother.
My mother held on to these items for years and then one day handed them to me along with box full of photo albums filled with me from birth to age 4. I think I was somewhere in my early 30s at the time.
I hauled those albums around for years because I thought I was obligated to and couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them. But I didn’t have any memory of them and beyond my being present in the photographs I had no connection with them. They weren’t my memories, they were someone else’s. Eventually I did get rid of them. I kept a handful of photos I thought were cute and a baby book that documented the first year of my existence but everything else was purged.
Then there were these clothes. Hand knit, crocheted, and sewn. I think the thought was that if I had a child I could possibly hand them down? A moot point since I decided not to have kids. So why have I been hanging on to these items? Just like the photo albums I have no connection to them. I know I wore them and who made them through photographs. So why am I unable to let them go like the albums? Existentialism? Perhaps.
Note about the camera: this photo was taken with the Kodak Charmera which was inspired by the single use camera – the Kodak Fling from 1987. A digital twist on Fling, the Charmera has 7 photo filters and 4 photo frames.
Loose Endings Studio 