The Scary Old People

 Hubs and I have cleared three houses full of stuff, the pictures were always the hardest to deal with. Eventually we decided that slides were out, pictures of people we didn't know were out and that lightened the load. 

That's Allison's comment on yesterday's post.  She didn't mention the additional conundrum G'ma and I faced, one cold February afternoon, as she reclined on her bed and I emptied the crawl space in the attic storage behind her.

Decades old corsages were easy to toss.  The portraits, not so much.  There were about a dozen of them, painted, in rotting wood frames.  

Ever practical, G'ma wondered if I knew who any of them were, because she certainly didn't.

She didn't even know if they were from her family or Daddooooo's, and this was well before her dementia robbed her of my name.  

Well, there's no one left alive to ask.  Toss 'em.

But, Mommy, they're.....

They're what?  Look at those farbissener punim.  

And they were ugly, angry faces, screwed up, not a hint of happiness or joy in any of them.  Did they know that they'd spent 5 decades in my mother's attic?  They looked eminently capable of haunting us.

Do you want them?  Don't give them to your sister, they'll just take up space in her basement.  Besides, look at them!  They're terrifying!

And so, the scary old people went out to the sidewalk, and G'ma and I found something to smile about as we removed the last vestiges of ourselves from our house.  And that's a very nice thing that the scary old people did for us, and for that I thank them..... more often than you might think.