A Frame of Reference
By Veronica MacDonald Ditko
An Accidental Anthropologist
I have a great four-section frame sitting on my shelf and I contemplate putting new photos in it. It currently has photos of my family while I was in college, and got stored away until I bought a house many years later. All that time I wondered where that frame was.
My other frames have photos that change quite often. At first, a frame says to me, “What a great trip that was last month!” Then it says, “What a great trip last year!” And then it gets replaced by an even more recent trip.
But when I unearthed this four-part frame, I realized frames are really time capsules if left untouched. There were four faces staring back at me that look totally different now, 15 years later.
My mother and father have much more gray and many more lines. My poor brother, who is sporting his lifeguard-in-the-summer bleached long hair, has now tried Rogaine and several other things to stop his hair loss. My sister at some point inexplicably lost a lot of weight and her face has stayed much thinner than in that photo.
I remember feeling silly, putting these family members in that frame. Other people at college didn’t have photos of their family on display. And it’s not like I talked to my family all the time either, unlike the youth of today with texting and tweeting and Facebook and emails. That is only something that has happened as we’ve gotten older.
I was so ready to move on from my high school years, and the town I grew up in. And that included my family. But now I look at that frame and realize that these are the people who anchored me. I didn’t know that then. I took them for granted. And now that I’ve started a family of my own, I see the process starting all over again.
Maybe I should leave all the frames in my house untouched, even though looking at the older ones bring me close to tears. Time will pass whether we let it go by or not. But we are left with snapshot memories of the times we’ve had with loved ones, framed one by one.
Veronica MacDonald Ditko is originally from the Jersey Shore, but married and settled in northern New Jersey. Her journalism career started a decade ago after studying Psychology and Anthropology in Massachusetts. She has written for several newspapers and magazines including The Daily Hampshire Gazette, The Springfield Union News and Sunday Republican, Happi, Chemical Week, The Hawthorne Press, The Jewish Standard, Suite101.com and more.