PHOTOS FADE

I turned the pages of an old photo album that my mother had kept of our trip to England and France the summer after my dad died. The photos had faded so much that they almost looked like watercolor, which inspired me to want to paint them. On our trip my mother was still in grief, and I remember how the tour gave her a lift back into life after being closeted with the too-familiar objects that had filled the various homes that she and my dad had shared for a lifetime.

It has been 36 years since my dad died, and 14 since my mother passed away. I don't think about them every day, but when I looked at my mother's face in those old photos feelings of affection swept through me.

The photos had been kept in one of those awful albums with stripes of glue to hold the photos and plastic sheets to cover them. The worst combination for preservation. Thinking about painting some of them, I scanned the photos into the computer. As I worked with each one,  I remembered walking through the vast room that was the Alnwick Castle library, which was filled with comfortable chairs, thousands of books, its collection of Medieval manuscripts and a Shakespeare Folio. Alnwick (pronounced Ann-ick) is the seat of the Duke of Northumberland on the outskirts of the village Alnwick. The castle was recently used in all the Harry Potter movies and is now a big tourist attraction. Our tour group, organized by my dad's alma mater SCSU in Minnesota and long before Harry Potter, stayed in the castle keep with its dorm-like rooms suitable for college students. For several days we savored being part of the quiet life of a country village.

Old postcard of Alnwick Castle still stuck to the photo page

Our tours of castles and cathedrals scattered throughout England and Scotland gave substance to what I had learned in my college Humanities classes. I thought of Chaucer, the Magna Carte, the Bayeux Tapestry, Henry the VIII, the Bronte sisters, Wordsworth, and William Blake as we traveled the narrow roads from London to the north to Scotland and then back south through Stratford-on-Avon to Windsor Castle.

Edinburgh, Scotland

At Lindisfarne, we looked across the sea to Scandinavia, then we walked on a foggy day on the narrow cobblestone streets of Edinburgh leading us past iron gates and lions' heads on sturdy wooden doors to the Museum of Childhood, which was filled with dollhouses and other toys. As we came south, we drove through the Lake District, we stopped for lunch at a pub built of the honey-colored limestone of the Cotswolds, and stayed in a charming bed and breakfast near Windsor Castle.

Boaters on Oxford's Isis River

My mom was in her late sixties at the time, very active especially with her grandchildren. She continued to ice skate and act as an ice-skating judge well into her 80s. She is of French and English ancestry, and so this trip was special for her. In Coventry we found a grave marker with the name Hart, her mother's last name, and she wondered if they were related to us. In France, she compared my silhouette to a bust of Josephine Bonaparte and determined that we both had the same nose.

As we went from one day to the next with me shepherding her to keep up with the tour schedule, I began to feel the reversal of roles from mother to daughter, and now daughter mothering mother. The trip gave me an inkling of what was to come. It's wasn't till much later when she developed Alzheimer's that my sisters and I became the mothers that our mother needed in the last years of her life as she faded away from her memories and the people she knew.

one of many charming cottages in England

Check out these sites in Great Britain:

https://www.cotswolds.com

https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/venue/museum-childhood

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/all-about/duke-of-northumberland

https://www.visitnorthumberland.com/holy-island

http://www.lakedistrict.gov.uk