The Photo Album
You can tell a lot about a person when you enter their home. On this I am very observant, other things perhaps not, but when it comes to what people value, I am pretty quick. Some homes are deep waters of living life; muddy boots at the door and the latest projects cover a portion of the house. Pictures filled with recollections cover the walls and trinkets are cleverly placed throughout the house so as to be a constant nudge of beautiful moments captured together. Other homes seem to have no depth at all. It is just a house they sleep in not a place they live.
My Grandma and Grandpa’s house takes a lot of time to absorb. You cannot walk into their home without being engulfed into their world. Echoes of the past hang upon every wall. My Grandma is a professional catalog keeper of photos. She has photo albums from each year and from the most recent vacation events, even if the place has been repeatedly visited. Each one is labeled with the year so she knows exactly when the photos occurred. Most pictures have little captions on them as well.
In this right I have taken after my grandmother. I am not good with captions on each photo but I do take time each January to print off one album worth of pictures from the previous year. I find if I don’t put a reminder on the time, I will lose it. It is not something I can complete in a couple days. It usually takes me about a month, placing a few photos in the new album each evening until it is done. It always seems daunting but I am pleasantly surprised with each completed album; mainly of the things I had forgotten that happened that year.
When I was a little girl, our house was always covered in pictures and we had a shelf that contained many family photo albums. Although my folks may not have been as good as Grandma when it came to developing rolls of film, they made sure the highlights were captured. It is an ongoing joke we say anytime we think of a fond memory, “Perhaps it is on one of those undeveloped rolls.”
I have heard it said that it is a lot harder for gentlemen callers to steal away Cinderella when he sees the narrative played out throughout the room he has been invited into. My folks made sure this played out in our home, until of course prince charming fought his way through. My father used to sit on the front porch, on more than one occasion, cleaning his gun when suitors would come to pick me up for a date or prom. My dad would make sure they were terrified of him. As the song says, he lived, he would wait right there until I returned, “cleaning his gun.”
In the advancement of old technology, with new additions and modifications, pictures are very easy and fast to take. I absolutely love how quick I can let grandparents see significant moments when we are far away. And yet very few people have photo albums inside their home. It is all kept on their hand-held device. We are content with our iPhone collage of photos. We never give much thought to the fact that none of these photos are really tangible. They are actually just a fleeting version that gets lost in the library of small thumbnails. How many opportunities do we really get to go through our photos in chronological order? Not many. And most definitely others will never scroll our phones to look at our treasures.
But something changes when our photos are put into an album. Perhaps nostalgia draws people to an album. Whatever the case may be, a photo album becomes a mile marker, showing the time that has passed. The laughter becomes a common bond as we all gather around laughing at the clothes selections and hairdos that seemed timeless until gazed upon by others. In short, a photo album is a cure between the generations.
Not long ago, I was putting some keepsakes away in our scrapbooks, when Eva said, “Mommy, I love to help you with the scrapbook.” She was so excited to see all these little items I had saved. She then turned the page and saw it was blank. She frantically exclaimed, “There is no story in it!” As a writer, I knew my reply immediately. With unyielding sentimentality, I replied, “That’s because those pages have yet to be lived.”
Just in case your kids grow up to be as sentimental as you are: save too many scrapbook items, print too many pictures, write too much in their journals, create too many memory boxes, and above all, stuff too many photo albums under the coffee table.
“We didn’t realize we were making memories. We just knew we were having fun.”
– Winnie the Pooh
Welcome Home
“The memory of the righteous is a blessing….” Proverbs 10:7
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