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Photo Album before/after On the counter-top, in the kitchen, sits ancient photo albums. Pictures older than me and twice my age grace the black card-board like pages. Eyes from eras long gone past stare out at me in the bleak shades of tan and grey, names unknown, some likely never to be known again, stories lost to the ages, as they stand their, some embarassed, some surprised, most dour looking, with the clear cut landscape surrounding them no shelter to be found, speaking of the harshness of life, and the withering aspects of age and time gone by, these children, aunts and uncles, adults, all dead long dead she died in childbirth he drank real hard, he was in world war one and she died young, too, they all look at me with eyes begging to be redeemed, imploring me for answers, of which I have very few, and I am caught by the heavy weight of time seeing the youth long since spent and gone shrivled like a grape drying in the sun in my grandparents, that withering loss of vitality, and know that these photos, these lost and inexplicable lives are as close as I can come to the nirvana of the soul I seek, the bulwark against entropy and decay, the coffee break, the time-out of life, that moment you wish you could dwell in and not have to fight the ankle biting dogs of time to survive for another day. Which hounding, bit by little bit, in the end, fells us all.
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