Thankful Thursdays

For a lifetime’s worth of words.

Some pictures, as they say, are worth a thousand words. Others, a lifetime of them. Here is one of those. One image that turns 70 this month.

On an April day in 1949, my parents, then teenagers and dating, took a day trip to Las Cuevas de San Vicente, in the province of Pinar del Rio in Cuba, and had this photo taken. A moment long ago when I wasn’t even a bleep on their radar, but without question was already part of God’s plan for them. The thought of that blows me away.

Every time I look at this photo, scenes of their lives play in my mind – – what I know about them, as recounted by Mom, the storyteller, and what I experienced firsthand through the years. Countless scenes of laughter, of tears, of sacrifices, of hard work, of parenting and love that exemplify their legacy: the ongoing social, emotional, and spiritual lessons that served to educate my siblings and me on the art of living right. Still today.

Those of you who know me know I love a good photograph. I can definitely tell you, I love this one. It’s a mouthful of memories.

I hope you all have many photos in your lives that speak 1,000 words to you. For mine, today and always, I am thankful.

What are you thankful for today?

Until next Thursday’s post…si Dios quiere.

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
-S. Sontag 

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
-Proverbs 22:6

“Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.” 
– S. Alder

“I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it’s never done.” 
– E. Hemingway

    Arturo y Olga, Las Cuevas de San Vicente, Pinar del Rio, Cuba (1949)