My Pictured Treasures

While reading the book The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry I come upon a sentence "...book shelves stored albums of photographs that no one opened".   I read it twice thinking about all the photos I had stored in boxes and albums over the past fifty years. Filled with remembrances, one snapshot at a time.  The color had disappeared and one could hardly identify who was standing there.   It gets me thinking about my "photo taking" world.

I began a picture taking adventure while teaching school, keeping a reminder of all the bulletin boards that were changed monthly and maybe reused in following years.   Then photo after photo was taken over thirty-five years of students in all sorts of learning situations.   

All our traveling adventures with friends needed to be recorded   The celebratory dinner parties, special gatherings and all events that needed a picture to really explain what was happening.   I didn't want to forget anything that existed in day to day living - year after year.

The computer arrived and completely changed my world of picture taking.   The camera stores closed.  Kodak picture development went out of business.   The purchasing of those rolls of film totally obliterated.  A new way of snapping photos took over my expensive camera.    Now 12,418 digital images appear on the iPhoto section of my computer. 

I became the person creating, cropping, polishing the masterpieces and sharing them daily with friends   Writings and pictures on FACEBOOK keep a different form of remembering what I was up to.   A blog was designed to display my art work, tell my stories, share my happenings and place those many, many depictions of my life whenever I appeared with a camera!

What am I going to do with all these memories?   I have put them on a small computer disc and continue using some on my blog.   But the day will arrive when I won't be capturing that best shot anymore, as the beauty of things will be there at the moment I see them, not years after.   I have come a long way, just like Harold Fry, where those great tubs and boxes of treasured flashbacks will just be a memory.