Recently, my parents downsized. They moved from a spacious three bedroom house to a smaller two bedroom condo. Since they are both in their seventies, they decided to use the move to bequeath certain worldly goods onto their children. (I think they did this to reduce the number of boxes they had to wrestle in and out of the U-Haul truck, and since my husband and I helped them move I am thankful for this.)
But then came the 24 gallon tote full of photographs and the twelve photo albums with pictures dribbling out the sides and bottoms.
My mother didn’t see why her children had to wait until she and my dad passed before enjoying a lifetime of photos and, more importantly, she didn’t have room in the new condo.
Ummm. Yeah.
I got the job of dispersing the pictures between me and my five siblings. While we are of a certain age that should know better, sibling rivalries and childhood antics have not been forgotten. And I the youngest of the brood get to referee, er, dole out the booty? And this on top of the bad feeling engendered by the simple fact that I have a substantial collection of my mother’s art work–which oddly enough fell under the same rule of not having enough space to keep them.
But I digress…
I wrote and told my siblings of the photo adventure awaiting me and told them how I was going to deal everything out. Which was simple–my mother in her infinite wisdom had given each of us an album of our early years and photos of us with them as we married and had children of our own. The photos that we had sent to them of our vacations with them or school photos as our children aged were to be handed out our other siblings so they might have a glimpse of those moments in time.
That took care of most of the photos in the 24 gallon tote.
Then came the old photos.
As the youngest, I only experienced these events from the snug embrace of my mother’s egg basket, but these were precious times of an extended family–people that exist mostly on the fringes of my memories. There were pictures of my great-grandparents before they immigrated to America and images of a close-knit family who carved out a living from the land from the end last ice age and married the Europeans who arrived before the country was founded. American history isn’t just in the pages of a book, it is written in my families photos.
And those photos are now being scanned into my computer one after another, books and books of them. Along with letters written by my Grandmother of memories, my mother’s notes on her growing up, my grandfather’s memories of eating an apple on his sea voyage to America and sneaking out of Poland hidden under hay in a wagon. There are love letters between my parents and my uncle’s recollections of being at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.
And then there are the orphans. The photos of people I don’t know and of events that were important enough to photograph but not to record in words. The neighbors who helped our family during the wars and the Influenza epidemic but who’s names are now lost.
Immersing myself in this project for the last five months, I have realized that I too am guilty of this crime. I have boxes of photos of my children that remain undocumented. As an author who tells the stories of ficitional characters, I am a little appalled by my failure to do this for my children. Fortunately, it’s not too late.
Now I just have to finish scanning the last album from my parents.