Roads out of Here

I love photografs that can't be placed. This one could be Italy, or France or...Memories are like that. They are like agates we pick up on a beach and take home, filling a big jar on the window sill. Each agate was a small time in life we wanted to treasure, polish, keep for eternity.

When we write our story down, describe a day here, a road there, we leave the present and reconstruct the past. It will be a touched-up past, photoshopped, cropped, embellished with ribbons and perfume.
It will become our creation of that past.

But it will still be who we were, and who we thought we were. This last part, the part about how we view our lives, gets lost and hidden. The best part of us is how we see who we are. We become the people we admire, the peopble we want to be. We decide to take the road our of town.

We are also from somewhere, from somebody else's dream, those who encouraged or discouraged to dream, those who believed in us and helped us fly, or those whose fears and despair we clutched to and adopted as our own cloak of defense. We can thank God, our parents, our teacher, our ministers and mentors, our spouses and our children, but we took those steps toward our very own tomorrows.