Anyone who knows me or regularly reads my blog, knows I love pictures. I love to take pictures and look at pictures. I nearly always have my camera with me.
I often say that my books are my friends. My photos are dearer friends than my books. Over the last 40 or so years, I have taken thousands of pictures. Pictures of my vacations, my kids being born, birthday parties, school programs, weddings. Trees, flowers, and mountains. Nearly everything I have a picture or two or more to remind me of the event.
After having my film developed, I would date and write the name of everyone in the picture on the back. Then, lovingly, I put each on in an album. Of course, the albums are in chronological order.
As I prepared to leave for Honduras, I packed the albums in boxes. I drove them from Illinois to Borger. I was leaving my precious friends in Janet's care. Since she has her own lifetime of albums dated and labeled in chronological order, I knew I could entrust her with mine. She graciously gave up closet space to store nine boxes of albums.
A couple of weeks ago we went to Oklahoma City for Dustin's wedding. Rick and Janet loaded the boxes of albums in their car and brought them to me in Oklahoma City. We loaded them in my car.
They are heavy boxes. I thought about taking one or two up to my hotel room to start looking at them. I decided against that. I really did need to get some sleep. I did look at some of them on Saturday afternoon though.
I moved the boxes into my bedroom. At that time, I did not have a place for them. I stacked the boxes in a corner.
This past Friday I bought a bookcase. I unpacked these albums late into the night. Of course, I had to place them in the right order.
It felt so good to be near my photos again.
Saturday was Ryan's birthday. I began looking at the pictures. Tears flowed down my cheeks. Such sweet memories. Before long, Emma joined me. As we looked at pictures of Nicole as a baby, Emma squealed with delight and kept saying, "Oh, she was so cute." Emma is right. Nicole was so cute. Emma and I laughed for a long time.
I can tell each time I bought a new camera. The pictures became better each time I upgraded. For some reason the dawning of a new century caused me to take even more pictures. In 2004, I went digital and the first granddaughter was born. Again, I began to take more pictures. Surely, there is picture of every breath Camille took.
I continued to take pictures while I was in Honduras, but they are all stored in Shutterfly. I can access those and look at them, and I do sometimes, but I still like pulling out the photo albums and flipping through the pages.
All may not be perfect in my world at this moment, but having those photo albums with me again, sure made my world a lot better.
