Full of Memories and Almost Empty

Mother and Daddy's house is almost empty...and today is the one-year anniversary of her death. We worked again all day yesterday, and took another load to the storage building. My sister and I are taking another load tomorrow after work, and we've each brought a couple of loads of more personal items to our houses. We found a picture of my sister taken when she was about eighteen years old, and I brought it home, framed it, and hung it on the wall. I found scrapbooks I'd made when I was in junior high and high school, along with a photo album from the same years. I found a picture of one of my favorite friends wearing a grass skirt and doing the hula at a party that was probably at a friend's lake house. That friend died of AIDS almost thirteen years ago, and he still crosses my mind every year on his birthday. He sent me red roses on my birthday one year; he was the first person to ever send me roses. I became engaged to DH three years after my friend's death, and I wrote his mom a note telling her of my engagement, and how much I was going to miss having her son as part of the festivities. I used to write her a note a couple of times a year, and I've let that fall by the wayside with my parents' illnesses and death and my husband's illness and death. I need to send her a card during the holidays, and catch her up on what's happened in my life and tell her that I still think about and love her son.