Earlier today, I was looking at a family history book my uncle wrote about my family and noticed a chapter about my grandpa and grandma’s 50th Anniversary Celebration on the Fourth of July in 1968. It just so happened that we were also celebrating my mom and dad’s 25th Anniversary on the same day. My uncle was recalling that day and how the younger generation frolicked about “unaware of the historic nature of the occasion.” How true.

The celebration was at my aunt and uncle’s farm which used to be the farm where my grandma had grown up. “Countless family gatherings had taken place [there for] over nearly 70 years”: marriages; births; deaths; and funerals. And when the expressway came through not too many years later, it would all disappear.

And yet, my uncle reflected, “when you look back on the long history of our forebears you see that it was just such thrusts of events that moved us to where we are today. . . There is only one certainty: Tempus edax rerum. ‘Time devours all things.'”

And that reminded me of the poem which AnnaLeah wrote when she was 12. I wondered whether she had read her Great Uncle Dan Waldron’s book and been inspired by it to write her poem, Time.