Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Ephemeral Ephemera

My grandmother kept an album of greeting cards and gift cards from her wedding showers in 1933. See this entry in the Marcell Armstrong Memorial Collection blog.

My mother's entire life -- conception, birth, education, marriages, years of career and family, years of retirement and volunteer work, and death -- took place in a span of time which sounds reasonable -- seventy years -- but which was so short that it barely even faded these fragile gift cards. They don't even look old, but they outlasted her entire span of mortal existence. We are truly ephemeral.

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