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THE CLOCK
Copyright © 2003-2010 M. Buck
My husband and I received a beautiful Anniversary clock from my mother. The clock would play a tune on the half hour and play a tune and chime each hour. After about a year the music and chimes stopped, we tried to repair it but to no avail. Still the clock kept perfect time so we just accepted it as an accurate timepiece and no more.
My mother and I were going through a closet when we found a very torn and tattered photograph of her parents, my grandmother and grandfather, on their wedding day. The photograph had been taken at the turn of the 1900's so it was very old and fragile. It was the only photograph of them so I convinced my mother we needed to have the photo restored and copies sent to grandchildren and great-grandchildren. None of the children in the family had ever met my mothers parents as they both died very young. My mother was orphaned when she was eight years old. So this lone ravaged photograph was all that was left as physical proof these two people ever existed.
The photo was not an easy restoration. It was a large photo, parts of it had been torn and some parts were missing. It would require the hand of an artist to paint in the missing and badly damaged areas. After many months the work was completed and we brought home a newly restored beautifully framed portrait which promptly was hung up. It was the first time my grandparents images had been displayed in almost 80 years.
Additional prints had been made of the restored photo and framed copies were sent to distant relatives who were finally introduced to Grandma and Grandpa.
A few days after the project and been completed and everyone had received their reprints it happened to be our wedding anniversary. I was leaving for work at 8am and walked past our accurate yet silent anniversary clock and a small framed reprint of my grandparents that now sat next to the clock -- unbelievably and amazingly, the clock played the tune and chimmed! It had been silent for a year prior and it has been silent ever since that morning. But on that special morning the clock was not silent.
I'm convinced it was an anniversary greeting from my grandparents. I think they appreciated our memorialization and that they will live on in future generations if just being remembered by a photograph.
I never met you Cathyrn and Sylvester, wish I could have.
"Foot falls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rosegarden." - T.S. Eliot
In Memory of Grandma and Grandpa.
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