On the other hand, I keep all my photos on my laptop and on flash drives - I don't make as many prints and albums as I used to. When I asked at Walmart where are the photo albums the clerk said, "oh, we don't stock them anymore"! I find that sad. But I found lots at Michael's and they were all 50% off!
My brother, Kim, and I started taking photos at a very young age. I have photos of myself up in trees, standing on the roof of our house wearing my mother's clothes and high heels, (obviously unbeknownst to my mother!), running up and down the fire escape at our elementary school and so on. Kim and I were enraptured by our mother's collection of old movie magazines and publicity photos. We did our own reenactments of famous scenes from "Gone with the Wind"and "The Wizard of Oz" using a tape recorder Kim got for Christmas one year.
But...I digress...
Since my childhood I have felt like a recorder of events. I take photos of everything, protest events, PRIDE parades, Kilally Meadows, flowers, birds, clouds, the cats - you've seen it all here. I come home from every trip abroad with 2,000-3,000 photos - I never know exactly what I've captured until I get home and start editing.
This year, as in many Christmases past, photos play a large part in my gift giving. Our new blessing, Hannah, is receiving a little album full of treasures. She mentioned to me when I was showing her photos of Kazi as a baby, that she didn't have any photos of "their dad" as her mother threw them all out. So I went through all of Kazi's albums to find any photos of their dad. I scanned and scanned, then had them printed at Walmart.
Included are photos of Kazi and Hannah's paternal grandparents. They are both named Kazimiera (Hannah's middle name) in memory of their Polish grandmother who was forced to sing on German radio to survive the labour camps of WWII. Their grandfather could grace the pages of any movie star magazine!
Then, one day at Michael's, I saw this album:
So.....off to Walmart again with my flash drive for photos of Luna and Lily to put in Kazi's stress busting little album: who can look at these photos and not smile?
Cheeky girls!!
Lily looks kinda jowly!
Another gift for Kazi this Christmas (I go for inexpensive yet meaningful!) -
in honour of the Cobalt (Stella) which I gave her a few years ago when I bought Dougie the Dodge.
Kazi cried when saying goodbye to Stella and pulled off a bit of rusty car as a memento. What she doesn't know (shhhhhh!) is that I've mounted that rusty bit of Stella in a shadow box for her to keep forever. Or until the next time she cleans her room, which could be until "forever"! I should have taken it out of the box for photos but you get the idea.
My last photo of photos today exists in almost all homes - the photo fridge depository: I see...a baby picture of Kazi, three photos of Hannah, a photo of my two sisters, a photo of one of my brothers, one of my sisters and me from the last time I was in PEI, a photo of my twin grand nieces, old notes, invitations, ticket stubs, a strip of 4 photo booth pictures of Kazi and I, a "grandpa" magnet (my dad died well over a decade ago), the note I wrote to my mom after she died, love notes from Kazi to me etc.
Once, years ago, a colleague came to my house to pick me up for a school-related function. As she came in the front door she asked "do you mind if I look at your fridge?...I learn so much about people from what they put on their fridge." It's true isn't it? It's like an evolving time capsule...when I get something I want to add it often means the removal of some former treasure. So what remains is what's most important at this particular moment in time.
To me, that's what a photo is - it represents something sacred in that particular moment in our personal history - more precious than diamonds.
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