Old photos stir memories
I was sifting through old photos the other day, trying to find some that were appropriate for use at my dad’s upcoming memorial service when I suddenly got lost in a vacuum of old memories. My dad was not fond of his picture being taken, so I had to dig way back to find enough quality ones.
For what seemed like only minutes, I flipped through photo albums and scrapbooks, seeing varying ages, weights, hairstyles and the like on myself and so many others. There was the photo of me at my brother’s high school graduation, wearing a dress that was so short, I would never wear it today. Another photo where my cheekbones were so prominent that they needed no rouge. There was a high school photo of my husband, wearing a baseball hat and waving for the camera.
More recent were pictures of our children, diaper-clad or learning to walk. The one where my middle girl tattooed her outie belly button with a face and her jutting protrusion as its nose.
My eldest reading a book to her infant sister, both wearing bowler hats for some reason. My son sitting in a clothes basket, pretending it is some kind of vehicle.
The pile of photos surrounding me got deeper. My son’s Cub Scout sleepover, my daughter’s trip to the Science Center, my eldest daughter’s homecoming. The first time my husband used his feed grinder, our kids pretending they were hamsters while rolling round bale rings out into the field to feed cows, our Great Dane traipsing through snow deeper than him.
Our friend’s baby bottle sitting beside a bottle we use to feed baby cows. The kids with several different sets of peeps, calves being warmed beside our wood stove. The various stages of our house remodel. Pictures of my husband with his parents.
Similarly, when my siblings and I began going through boxes at our parents’ house, we found ephemera from our own school years that my mom had kept.
The first time we wrote our names, pictures we had drawn in kindergarten, slips of paper from when we had gotten into trouble at school (some of us had more of those than others), and art projects depicting various ages and artistic abilities. We even found the bracelets put on our ankles at birth.
When we finally had a few decent shots of our dad, and we had laughed and cried about our memories, I was shocked to see what had seemed like mere minutes of looking had actually taken hours to sort. A whole lifetime of memories had fit into that span.
The photos of my dad will be cleaned up, blown up, framed and placed around his urn at the memorial service.
They will likely spark the memories of others who attend and who knew him at various points in his life.
I imagine they will share some of them with me, and that will be just fine. This time, I’ll be prepared for a long jaunt down memory lane.