the past and the present

I wish I could have expressed this as well as Helen Thames Raley does:  "Deep are these roots, inescapable, restorative. I thought about how life had gone on, generation after generation. Perhaps the past is really never gone, but always a part of the present. Lingering here in the quietness, I gather up the people, the places, the little fragments of another time."   (thanks lulu)

Photo: My grandparents, aged 20,  with their first baby. See the water pump, the washing machine, and other evidence of living around them? How I would love to spend a day with my grandmother as a young mother!