I am not old. I know that at age 31 I still have more years ahead of me than behind. But sometimes I can’t help feeling old, especially when I take time to look through old family photos and remember all of those seemingly-lost childhood memories. How incredibly special that we have photographs to look back on, to help us remember every last detail. Thanks to my mother’s fastidious photo albums, my siblings and I have a treasure trove of memories, cataloged, dated and labeled. My mother is a photo album magician. She would save all of our family photos and once a month, or once every two months, or whenever she could find the time, all those pictures would be splayed out on the dining room table while she sorted and dated them and carefully assembled them in a book with handwritten notes about places, friends’ names, favorite outfits at the time, birthday cake flavors and Girl Scout troop leaders. She included so much detail in the albums that they are veritable encyclopedias of our family.
Now, as adults, our family is redefined, re-imagined and reorganized in a way that photo albums can no longer narrate. Divorces, marriages, births and deaths mean that one series of books isn’t enough to cover all of the lives intertwined in a large family. I try to live up to my mother’s standard of photo alubms, try to make the time to cull through pictures and put them in date order so that we, and our children, will have something to look back on. It’s hard work, but the value of these things is endless.
So here I share a few old family favorites. I love them for their imperfections as much as for the memories they conjure. On this particularly cold, nostalgic early spring New England day, something warm is in these photos. I can only hope that when I photograph other families and their memorable occasions, I provide them with as much warmth and happy memories as these snapshots provide me.
