TREASURING THE PAST

While at a craft market downtown Los Angeles a few weeks ago, I was talking with a young gal in one of the booths.  She mentioned that she had over 7,000 pictures on her phone.  Seven thousand!!  She was saying that she ran out of space and would have to figure out how to sort through them.  A daunting task for sure!

I'll admit it.  I'm a bit OCD about my photos.

It started in high school when I would get pictures printed up and would put them in "albums" just like my mom did.  Her albums were just cloth covered three ring binders with plastic covered black pages that held the photos attached by photo corners.  Most every picture had a notation on it in her cursive writing.  We would give her grief every time she took out the camera, but she would take pictures anyway.  She would remind us over and over that we complained, yet we loved looking through the photo books.  Our lives were documented and saved and visited and treasured.  (And still are - at every family event, she wants to "document" that time with a few pictures that she then adds to the most recent album.)

Mom's many scrapbooks

My albums were similar to hers.  I enjoyed organizing the photos and was diligent about making sure everything was up to date.  I had my blue binders too.  And plastic page protectors with black paper inside.  And photo corners.  

About the time that I got married in 1983, the scrapbooking craze was in its infancy.  Creative Memories and the consultants that sold the product and did workshops popped up everywhere.  I fully believed the "acid free" hype and bought my first album, pens, stencils, and whatever I would need to put together my first "real" album that would last forever.  It took a lot of courage to take out my paper cutter and cut the pictures up to create inviting pages.  But cut I did.  A lot.

My albums - that I'm still trying to find a place for

Scrapbooking got more sophisticated and more fun.  Scrapbooking stores popped up here and there and there were so many things to buy!!  Stickers! Pens! Hundreds of paper selections!  It was a joy to put all of these things together and I did - for the next 20 years.  Then I got behind.  And things went digital.  And I let things go.  

Last week we took a trip to Chicago and attended the memorial service for my husband's aunt who passed away at age 99.  My husband's brother brought two albums of pictures that had belonged to their mother with lots of pictures of the five sisters, their husbands and families.  My husband and his cousins looked through them and reminisced.  And laughed.  And shared memories.  And each took the most meaningful ones with them.

Someday I will probably be given all the albums stored in the closet in my mom's house.  And then they will most likely be passed down to my daughter, along with all of mine.  I'm hoping they will bring her joy as my mother's have for me.  But first I need to catch up.  Retirement is a good thing I guess.  No more complaining about a lack of time.  I need to buy some cool paper and some stickers and get started.  More albums to store.  More to pass on in the years to come.  And more reason for my daughter to think about someday finding a pretty large space to store them all!