Welcome to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes and lives? Every month a group of six bloggers share their work-spaces, homes, towns, thoughts, with posts based on specific prompts. It’s been so interesting over the years to see the different ways each of us interpret the topics.

This month’s prompt was “If I could travel in time.” This topic took a lot of thought. Would I like to travel to the future to see what’s ahead? Would I like to go back to a time already passed, like the 1950s or the Renaissance?? I actually gravitated to two totally different answers to this – and one quickly became very complex and I just do not have time. Maybe someday. That time was “the beginning of religion.” How interesting to hear those initial discussions…how the first person/people wondered about where we came from, how did we get here. But I can’t take one more step in that direction today. But that would be fascinating.

The other time, more personal and close to home, is the 1970s, when both my parents were still alive. When I was old enough to understand that my parents had lives beyond just…being my parents…but young enough that I still had the opportunity to speak with them on more of an adult level and try to understand them better.

I regret not taking the opportunity when I had it. In my defense, I was a kid, a teen…and was pretty focused on my life, not really giving much thought to theirs. It’s only from an adult perspective that I realize how little I knew my parents. What kinds of people they were. How they turned out the way they did.

Only years after his death (my father died when I was 22) did I become interested in things like gardening and photography – two things that had been passions of his. How nice it would have been if we’d been able to connect through those interests and not just as a father/daughter. I know he loved me but we were not especially close.

And now, I would love to his stories about his military time during the war. He turned 20 in 1939, the year World War II started…and he was in the Navy for 20 years, so he saw all of that war and probably some of the Korean War. I suspect we would not necassarily see eye-to-eye on all the elements, but I still would like to hear his views and experiences.

My mother is a different story. I’m still going through all my father’s old slides from the early years of their marriage and their time spent living overseas in Italy and Japan. And the woman I see in these photos – is not my mother. She is not the woman I knew. She looks social and vivacious and happy. *My* mother was depressed and fearful and reclusive. She could “turn it on” for other people, and they saw her as outgoing and gracious and hospitable. But those moments were fleeting…and when my friends left, or we returned home from visiting her family on the west coast…she got back in her nightgown and in her bed and wouldn’t drive after dark and would make three right turns to avoid a left turn against traffic and turned down every invitation from people who wanted to be her friends.

On the inside, I’m her…but I’m fighting it. I don’t think she felt like she had that option.

So I would love to really talk with her and ask her to help me understand what changed her from Person A to Person B. Because from the outside, I don’t see it. At the time I was just annoyed by it. Now I feel sympathetic…and a little ashamed I didn’t try harder to have a nicer relationship with her.

I would like to travel back to a time when I could care more about my parents as people. And not just the people who gave me food and a place to live and annoyed me with stupid rules and flashes of crazy (according to 16-year-old me).

I apologize for the absence of pictures. The pictures are…somewhere…on a drive…that is somewhere…maybe in this house, maybe in a dumpster, maybe en route in a box from New York…who knows. Every day is a mystery. Every day is an adventure.

Be sure to visit my friends to see when in time they would like to travel!

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Em at Dust and Doghair
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Leslie at Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own