For the last couple of days I’ve been lost in the past. Sorting through photographs that I’ve found stored in the back of drawers, inside long unopened cupboards and sticking out of the middle of books. Photos in old fashioned sticky albums, in sleeved albums. Photos on CD’s, on laptops and phones and computers. Thousands of them. Some from weeks ago and others from decades ago.
I’ve always loved taking photographs, not in an creative artistic way but rather as a means of capturing moments in time. I’m one of those irritating people who get so caught up in ensuring that I ‘m capturing everything on film that I sometimes forget to live the moment. Sometimes it’s a pain but years later it pays off.
I’ve been living those moments again and again while I rifle through my past like a speed-reader glancing at a page and picking up the gist of the story. It’s not just for sentimental reasons, although it is certainly stirring up an emotion or two, rather I am making one of those super cool photo walls to make my house look more like my home. For this I need to choose my very favourite photos, the photos that tell the story of our family.
It is a strange and emotional experience going through your past in picture format.
It takes you right back to your earliest memories when you see your favourite scarf, the one whose tassles you pulled through your fingers as you sucked your thumb to sleep as a little girl. It’s overwhelming to see the little girl who shares your body going to school for the first time. Such a different little girl but yet still the very same woman.
It takes you through a roller-coaster of emotions to see the high school version of yourself who thought she was so cool. Cool is different from troubled but she didn’t know that. Now you just want to reach out to her and yank her away from that very turbulent time.
It’s cringeworthy when you see yourself in high school with crimped hair or worse when you finally dig out the wedding photos that you have been hiding because you had a perm THE DAY BEFORE your wedding.
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It’s overwhelming when you open a box of wedding photos and find hidden inside the hand written love letters your husband and you exchanged during some of the hardest times. It’s tragic when you recall the events surrounding some of those letters but it’s magical when you realise where you are today and that you’re still together only you love each other even more now.
It’s like a slap in the face when you look at pictures of your parents and realise that you are older now than they were in those photos – even though then they were your very old and wise parents at the time.
It’s confronting when you look at the pictures of your new born baby attached to a ventilator that is breathing for him and think to yourself “I could never handle that” but at the time you did it and you sat at the hospital by his side every day for two months and took more and more photos every day.
It’s like a break in the clouds during a black storm when you see the pictures of that same tiny child leaving hospital and all the clouds evaporate when you look through his life and see huge smiles dominating his every waking moment. Because you’ve photographed most of these moments.
It fills you with warmth and happiness as you flip through holidays and birthdays of the family you have created and you smile from deep within at the memories they bring.
It’s comforting to know that you’re still taking photos. And important to remember never to stop writing letters.
