The past that paved the way.....

I am not exactly spring cleaning but obsessing over a bench that I absolutely love that is broken for the last time. It's black with beadboard  and hooks for coats, I remember thinking that maybes life will change when I was putting it together in my new house way back then. I opened it up to remove the contents before I broke it down and started taking everything out. Apartment living, back here again. I take all the paper Halloween lanterns and orange lights and stack them as I wonder why I let a red Target clearance tag convince me to buy the very hideous very unused party napkins I am looking at. As I go to pull them out I see them..... My past, hanging out together. One is a picture of my first husband and I at our wedding when I was just 17. It is about an 8x10 piece of wood painted black with alabaster on each of the corners. We had the picture made in Korea where I explored a new life for six months right after we got married.

Right on top and off to one side was the custom bouquet of flowers my daughter and I had made for my second husbands funeral. Dried blue roses with a fat silk black bow wrapped around it. It felt weird as those two worlds and very different lives of mine collided in one broke down bench seat. I wondered where I would be right now if my first husband didn't die in a head on collision. Would I forever tried to please him and never come to know who I really was ? Hard to say as I was only 24 when he died. And what about my second husband, would I have went another 15 years being a sympathetic punching bag hearing I am sorry for the rest of my life? He committed suicide when I was 39. I am now 43, in an apartment living with the two youngest boys left of my four kids cleaning past midnight. I can't help but wonder if it was all to bring me to where I am at this very moment in my life. It's hard to know what to do, do we toss out the past like yesterday's paper? Me, well I hope my truly wonderful boyfriend does not get offended, but I will keep them. They are not "baggage" as some people think. They are there so that I can always remember to be thankful for the life I have now. It is not perfect but it is the best it has ever been. I'm exhausted with work In 7 hours. Goodnight.