(April 24, 2026)
It chilled the warmth around my beating heart. A “memory,” Facebook calls it, although it is my memory and only their algorithm. I had not forgotten; it was only that it was unexpected, the face almost life-size on my screen. I had taken the selfie with my Canon D-40. I don’t have that camera any more.
We smile against scattered clouds on azure sky, our shoulders and heads conjoined in a pyramid. A pyramid is the most stable structure in architecture and the ideal composition in Renaissance art. I had managed to frame us perfectly, like the one portrait you hope your wedding photographer will take. No wedding snapshot—twenty-five years into our thirty-nine-year union—had even managed that.
Facebook dates the post of course—eleven years ago today—but I do not need them to tell me that.
We were in Lithuania, the weather ricocheting from sleet to sunshine. The photograph was taken in Balbieriškis, the tiny village where his mother was born, received her First Communion, tended cows, and waited with her sister to immigrate to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to join their father, who left first, and their mother and brother, who followed years later. Balbieriškis is where the cousins still live. In the distance, there is a glimpse of the Nemunas River, the longest river in Lithuania, which forms near Minsk in Belarus and meanders west and north until the empties into the Curonian Lagoon at the edge of the Baltic, on the border between Lithuania, and that curious fragment Russia retained after the fall of the Soviet Union—the Kaliningrad Oblast.
It was not our first visit. Three years earlier, we had gone to meet the cousins and journeyed from Kaunas to the Hill of Crosses in Šiauliai and on to the Curonian Spit, where we walked in cold sea waters, tasted smoky žuvis, and admired the summer home that Thomas Mann had built and from which the Nazis had forced him away. We ate koldūnai in Vilnius.
Our second time, we nested in the Republic of Užupis in the capital, across the Vilnia River from Old Town. We could see Gediminas’ Tower from our doorstep. The koldūnai restaurant had closed.
I went alone then, carrying his ashes to the cemetery in Balbieriškis. The view overlooks a strip of flatland on the other side of the Peršėkė River that used to be the family farm. We had seen a man tilling the ground with his chestnut horse, followed by a stork who dined in the upturned earth. The soil is rich, soft and black. The hole his cousin dug was precisely one meter deep and cushioned with late flowers from the garden. A coverlet petals lay above the ashes. The priest, in purple stole and with sacred water, blessed that place and all of us there.
In time, I will orbit again past all our anniversaries. My memory will not need a prompt then, either. The past sustains.
Ellen B Cutler is an art historian, former art museum educator, and freelance writer. She lives in East Boston, Massachusetts, where a glass of wine, good art, and the companionship of her dog Ping (named for the homeless ducking in Marjorie Flack’s 1933 classic story) is all she requires.