Gone but not forgotten

It was a photo. My first child, who is a mother now herself, was only days old. I had put a tiny pink dress on her with white tights that sagged on her little bird legs. She had only been 5 pounds 11 ounces at birth but she was likely even tinier than that at the time of the photo. I had tied white knit booties on the tiny flippers at the end of those stick legs. I had had to roll the sleeves of her cardigan (also pale blush pink with rosebuds instead of buttons) so her little starfish fingers would show. I propped her up in front of a white sheet, still at the hospital. I remember her hands curled into fists like coral pink sprouts. Her red hair was fluffy and stood up from her forehead. But when I pointed the camera at her, she gurgled and one corner of her mouth lifted into something that would resemble her real smile 34 years later. I loved that photo. Almost as much as I had loved the child. But one day, years later, the basement of the home where I stored my photos flooded very unexpectedly. I swam through the knee deep water in a panic, trying to salvage all my precious photos in those primitive unthinkable days before “clouds” and the such. I saved most of them. But not that photograph. I watched though, my heart wrenching, as the photo disappeared, disintegrating before my horrified eyes. Until only the memory of it was left. A pale ghost of it in my mind. But it is there. Until my mind fades in the end. I image it it will hang there in the unseen, maybe the last thing I know, until I don’t…any longer.