Memory was a curse, yes,..but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory, you lost everything.” – Anne Rice, Blood and Gold.

It is true that I believe it is a sacred thing to follow your heart and do what you love rather than only work to pay bills and add to a retirement account that exists mostly for the profit of others. To me, working only for money is a kind of slavery.

It is a sacred task for me to seek out, know and support creative people who work, often against overwhelming odds, to pursue what they love. I admit I am also deeply touched by people who remember, rather than emotionalize the past. The past isn’t better or worse than now, it is just the past, and when we lose our sense of the past we lose a part of our souls.

This is why I take so many photos of old farms and farms and old farmers. Then they are gone, they can never be replaced.

I met one of those people who love the past and wish to rescue lost and forgotten things this weekend, her name is Leslie Green-Witham, she is a retired National Park Service employee. She is obsessed with “rescuing” furniture and giving rebirth to it.

She who has marshaled her savings to commit herself to rescuing furniture and other objects that have been discarded by fickle humans, things are often lost, hidden away, forgotten, or thrown into the trash.

With the support and encouragement of her husband Cliff, Leslie opened  a store in a beautiful old space on Main Street called “Shiny Sisters.” Maria and I  bought a beautiful old  Eastlake dresser in her shop yesterday for $175. She falls in love with things other people have forgotten, she rescues them, re-imagines them, and brings them back to life.

When she talked to me about her work, I got excited about going to her shop from time to time and asking me to show me things she has rescued or re-imagined, or that touch her in some way. Her studio is filled with rescues.

She is the real deal, not looking for wealth but for meaning and memory. She reminds of the big-hearted people who rescue animals, she gets the same satisfaction from saving a dresser or old desk than some people get picking up a starving kitten on the road. And she is an artist, she restores things lovingly.

I am drawn to this idea of rescuing the past, not through nostalgia, which I have little use for, but by remembering, re-imagining and rescuing. Leslie doesn’t just save old things, the gives them new life in different ways. Sometimes she preserves their truth, sometimes they are unrecognizable.

I want to write about the rescue of things at ShinySisters, and the first thing in her shop that I was drawn to was this old photograph, touched up by a painter, we think. She found it at an auction of old things being thrown out of house and she felt for it, she took it home and cleaned it up and put it up for sale in her store.

I don’t believe in throwing away lives, people in the present, people in the past. I think we we have these portraits done, we think they will live forever. Life happens in the wink of an aye, there are new photos to hang on walls.

Leslie thought this photo should live. The picture shows a mother and daughter, it was taken sometime before 1900. Leslie believes these images are timeless, they are the story of two lives – a mother and  daughter that speak to us from more than 100 years ago, another time, another world. But the love between a mother and a daughter has not changed.

Leslie couldn’t bear to see it go into the trash.  It’s an odd thing, we see these kinds of photos all the time, few people want them, they are most often thrown away or destroyed. Yet they tell us if the loves of a woman and her child, and of  a time when people took formal photos like that, so they would never forget one another.

How much is an image like that worth to total strangers living more than a century later. I don’t know.  I thought the image so beautiful and otherworldly. I think I will be a memory one day soon, and I wonder if any part of me will survive, and touch someone else in another hundred years.

I told Leslie to call me when she finds something she is excited about rescuing, and I will rush to come and take photo before it is bundled up and burned or ends up in somebody’s trash. And to see  how she might re-imagine it.  So, a new feature for the blog – old things that need rescuing.