Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Out of the Ether



          My mother always kept our loose photographs in a Whitman’s Sampler box. We usually had an empty one available each year, either from Christmas or Valentine’s day. It was a good choice, sturdy with a hinged lid, and with the added bonus of the aroma of past chocolates. 


          I don’t remember anyone ever sitting down to put all those pictures in albums and many of the photographs are now long gone. Hard to say whether or not this is a cause for regret, since now we have shelf after shelf dedicated to the photographic records of my husband’s parents and grandparents. Like every other family, we have too many album pages where we strain to remember who those faces belong to.


          Our own album assembling stopped with my daughter’s wedding twenty years ago. Now, like so many others, our past has joined the future, stored on our computers and flash drives. While this is less cluttering than shelves of photo albums, it’s a lot less satisfying. When the family comes for a visit, they don’t gather around the computer the way they used to plop down on the couch, ready to make fun of old hair styles. 


          I need more solid memories, so after my first year of blogging I realized that my words felt no more preserved than if I’d written them on a balloon and launched them into the air. Thus, the project I take on every January. 


          Being a Virgo, of course all my blog entries are stored in alphabetical order on my computer with corresponding photo files, just asking to be organized one more time into physical form. Fortunately, fifty per cent sales at sites like Snapfish or Shutterfly are as certain as death and taxes. 





 Now I can save my increasingly rare insights on life and
 too-elusive memories, while leaving behind something tangible of myself.

           

16 comments:

  1. One fact about Virgos (Virgoes?): you are perfectionist. Another fact: I love that. Another fact: I am a Scorpio with Virgo rising. So, I am a bit of a perfectionist. Which is why I loved this post. Thanks. :-)

    Greetings from London.

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    1. Probably less of a perfectionist (my mantra when gardening is, "It's better than it was.") than a control freak. Or maybe someone with a sadistic need to pass on yet one more thing for my kids to deal with.

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  2. Good for you! I am way behind on that project...the blog books...I might have a partial handle on the loose photos BUT not the albums:)

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  3. Great idea. At some point, before she passed on my wife wrote on the back of the old snapshots in our albums who was who.

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  4. I remember when my mother died and my sisters went through the suitcase filled with photographs from my parents' long marriage. Many pictures nobody knew who they were, but all of the ones I had in there were given to me in a plastic bag. I still look through it now and then. But there were LOTS of people nobody knew. Mama and Daddy didn't label them. I'm not sure what happened to them. :-)

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  5. I've thought of doing a similar thing, but that would require far too much finding and sorting, since all my posts are only stored on the actual blog page and a lot of them are not worth keeping. in my first year of blogging, I did make a 'blog-to-book' edition of what I thought were my best posts and gave it to my sister as a Christmas gift.
    I still have a few boxes of loose photos as well as several albums where the photos are all mixed up instead of being chronologically sorted.

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  6. My parents photo album consisted of a shoe box. As you said many of those photos disappeared. I have to consider my log and what should be done about it.

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  7. I love it. And am in awe at those with the discipline to do it.

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  8. Cool! I've never done this with my main blog, but the old paper journals that I'm now transcribing into a separate blog would be prime candidates! I'd love to have neater, edited hard-copy versions. (And I'd love to get rid of my tattered old notebooks, but I don't know if I'll ever have the courage.)

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    1. Another motivation for me is that if I've taken the time to think about and then write something, I don't want its lifespan to be only 3 or 4 days.

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  9. Every so often I make a photo album online and get it printed. It's great to have the best photos in a book. Relatives love it too.
    I would love to have my blog printed, but I think it may be a bit much, and lots of photos. I'm going to have another think about that. It would be nice...

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  10. My sister wanted to surprise me with a hard copy of my blog but she was told only the blog owner could do it. I guess up to me just means balloons in the air.
    Sadly our family photos did not always make the many changes of address we went through.

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    1. To put it into a Shutterfly book, all I do is copy my words and paste them into the template they provide. Pictures do need to come from a file on your computer.
      It's not difficult, just tedious.

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  11. I never thought of doing a Shutterfly book of some of my posts. I like the idea! Not sure I kept all the photos, though.

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    1. I wonder if you could copy them from your blog and park them in a file on your computer.

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  12. Oh I intend to do that too but now I'm going on 8 years and still have not got a single book done.

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Thanks for stopping by and I'd love to hear what you think.