This past summer, I felt an unusual feeling; boredom. I had just returned from Europe, only had 4 weeks until I returned to school, and had no job or tasks to accomplish. My mother suggested that I organize our armoire downstairs, a piece that had been a catch-all for family photos since I can remember. Stupendous, I thought to myself, I have a purpose! This project will maybe take three, maybe five days tops. How wrong I was. The remains of the project that I started in June are still scattered across our dinning room table as of yesterday, September 5. My mother has not asked me to help out around the house since.
What I thought would take days turned out to be a massive project, one that involved cataloging not just my life but the lives of all my immediate family members. My mother, like all young mothers, had taken countless pictures of my brother and I. We seem to age by the day as we are young, then much quicker as the years progress. We might have had a hope of finishing the project had my dad's cousin not decided to pile on another set of photos. When he returned from Louisiana, he had an entire box filled to the brim with much older pictures. It seemed my Aunt Renee was cleaning out her photos too, and giving the excess to us. We put the box aside and tried not to think about it. This past labor day, I finally retrieved the box and decided to tackle these pictures once and for all.
Turns out my great-grandparents had a photo collection that rivals the Smithsonian. This one box had everything from candid pictures to newspaper clippings, with a few elementary school diplomas in between. They had photo after photo of snow days, vacations, parties, graduations, the list was endless. We even found my Dad's birth announcement, expressed in oil rigging terms, i.e. "Well sprung Sept 9th" etc. Though I had never met Agnes and Willie, it was clear through these pictures that my great-grand parents had lived a full and happy life. Parties, Christmas gatherings, kids, relatives, trips to Europe, they truly lived. With every photo I felt as if I had gotten to know another piece of them. They took such care in archiving every aspect of their lives, in a time when it wasn't as easy to do so. I never found any scandalous pictures, someone having an affair, past loves, confidential area 54 documents. Not finding these didn't take away from the pictures. My tale of archiving didn't have to read like a Nicholas Sparks novel for it to mean something to me. It was enough just to get to see the past through the eyes of a camera.
And that was the second half of my summer. Not as cool as Europe, but close.
I love old family photos. You are luck your family kept them. Perhaps, one day, they will inspire you to write a book.
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