[jdviole2]

I was reading a correspondence from a friend last night and something he said triggered something in me. He was talking about how the sight of a picture would trigger memories. That got me thinking of how my memory works. I was in the computer field and I always relate my brain to a computer. I store and retrieve memories just like a computer does. Sometimes I seem to have the memories locked away and need a password to access them. That is the picture, or sound, or smell, whatever that my friend mentioned. That password will then unlock memories that have been locked away, and those memories will unlock more until my brain is almost overloaded. That has happened a lot lately while searching all the pictures of Helena. Things I had long forgotten have come back. As an example. I had forgotten the days that she was taking some medicine and it caused her to gain a huge amount of weight. I found one of the few pictures I have of her from that time and it brought it all back. She was ashamed of the way she looked even though it wasn't her letting herself go and gaining the weight, but the side effect of the medication. I have posted that as the first picture for today, it was in 1985 taken in California. This is a picture that she would NOT have wanted me to post. However I have also posted the proof that it was only the medication that caused the bloating. The second picture shows her less than a year later after she stopped the medication and the "bloat" went away. This was at the Worlds Fair in Vancouver in 1986. (she still thought she looked fat). From then on she was very concious of her weight and would try to make sure she posed in such a way to appear thin in any picture. The most potent memory passwords for me though are the photos taken by Helena's father. I had thought her Graduation Picture had been taken by a professional photographer, based on the pose. However yesterday I found a bunch of old pictures of her and realized that her dad had taken all the graduation pictures. The third picture is from the set he took for her graduation. That was in 1970. She was 19 (due to her illness when she was a girl she lost a year and graduated late). After we met in 1973 she had her dad take a large number of pictures (for me). She only sent me a few and some of the others I have never seen. The fourth photo is one of those. The first time I saw this picture was yesterday. I fell in love with her all over again. She was 22 when this was taken. I had also forgotten how many "clothed" photos I had taken of her during her nude posing sessions. The fifth is another of those pictures, from 1975. I don't remember taking the last picture at all. It was probably in 76 or 77. She was dressed to go out somewhere. Helena never wore much makeup. I don't remember her ever wearing as much lipstick as she has on in this picture. Seeing so many unseen or unremembered pictures in one day did overload my brain. I think I will need to be careful not to find too many "passwords" for a few days. I will have to be careful of the music I listen to in case I accidently play one of her favorites. One of the first things I did when I started to clean the house was to dispose of her leftover perfume. I think the smell of that might just be too much to bear. Yesterday I turned to her chair to ask her a question. Felt like a damn fool. I'm finding the trick to the whole cleaning thing is to leave enough of her in the house so it is still her house, but not so much that I get overwhelmed when I enter a room. Its a delicate balance. I know that this will change some as time passes but she will never completely be gone. She meant too much to me for that to ever happen. This has been a kind of a rambling post, sorry about that. Tomorrow I will try to be back with some more concrete memories to share with you.