Photographs and Memories
A few days ago, a bunch of photographs arrived in the mail from my cousin Marc. No note is in the yellow envelope, just a bunch of old photos. They are pictures of Marc’s family and mine, from many different moments from our past. There’s the famous snowball and sledding photo shoot of my youth, with Marc, my sister and me outside my Sunnyside home. I must have been five or six years old. Many photographs show us celebrating some kind of milestone. Lots are from my mother’s 70th birthday party many years ago, and others are from a celebration for Marc’s mother. Many photographs I have seen before, and others, even ones I’m in, I don’t fully recall the scene.
We all look so much younger. My mother looks so young and pretty. I don’t recall ever seeing her in that gorgeous blue dress. She looked happy and glowing. My first impulse is to show these to my mother. She would be the one to really appreciate these pictures, as so many of the pictures are of her beloved aunt and uncle. But she is no longer here, as is the case with many of the people in the photographs. So these mementos of a time past are mine.
I’m reminded of helping my mother-in-law clean out the tons of photographs in a crawl space of her sprawling Florida home after her husband had passed in 2019. She didn’t want the photos; her eyesight was really bad. Who gets custody of these photos, I wondered. “You can’t throw them away,” I told her. But she had no use for them anymore.
Time to play “Photographs and Memories” by Jim Croce. What a beautiful song.
Dear Heidi,
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful treasure. One of the things that breaks my heart the most is that I have so few photos from when I grew up. When I was eight years old, our house burned down and we lost many of our most precious memories.
I remember prior to then coming across pictures that I hadn't seen before and how special those were to me. I'm elated that you've been able to have that experience, even if it's bittersweet, and I hope you may have an even greater appreciation for them as you treasure them in new ways.
With Warmest Regards,
~Carla Michelle
Photographs are a treasure and in some ways a curse. At least when there are boxes and boxes of them. I really struggle to organize photos and properly keep them. I get so frustrated by the multiple copies and at teh same time can get lost in my memories--which I love. I wouldn't ever not want pictures but I wish I better at taking care them.
ReplyDeleteI've been going through photos for months. I just sent the 2nd box off to be digitized. And then there's the job of organizing the digital pics. My sister-in-law sent me old pics that I've organized by family names. It's much easier to put my hands on certain of the old photos by organizing them this way. I hope you'll write what you know about the pics. I did that this past year with some of the old pics from my dad's family as part of my #52stories project for the year. Cherish this opportunity to be the keeper of the mementos.
ReplyDelete