100 word Rambling - Pictures

The back reads-Mom worried about moving day
I'm assuming the caption is written in my Mom's hand as this is my grandmother.

A month or so ago I began a project of scanning old pictures.  I finished my own a while back and so this past weekend I collected my parent’s albums to start going through them.  The last few days I’ve spent immersed in the tangle of photos and I’m enjoying myself greatly as I flip through stack after stack sometimes smiling at a distant memory.  Some I’ve never seen before or were taken long before I was born yet some of those ones seem to speak to me the loudest and like this one I love them all the same.  

Picture This

I am by no stretch of the imagination a great photographer, I do enjoy taking pictures and between my husband and I we have managed some pretty nice shots over the years many of which are displayed around the house.

One of my favorite picture groupings is two collage frames filled with pictures of the girls as babies.   I always love to stop and see how even in these very early pictures you can see how very different their personalities are despite their similar looks.

When I put these collections of pictures together I recall having had a difficult time.  What I had an issue with was not only deciding which pictures to use, but which pictures I was willing to cut in order to fit the many differently sized frames.

With my youngest it’s not an issue, her baby pictures are all digital format and so they can be printed and reprinted and reprinted.  My oldest however arrived a few years before the advent of digital cameras and so in many cases a picture only exists as that one and only photo. 

Cutting a picture which can’t be re-printed means you better be darn sure that’s the one you want.  It’s something that’s bothered me and has more than once prevented me from using a picture I wanted to use.

Another advantage I noticed with digital copies is digital picture frames.  While setting up a new one for my Dad recently I realized how odd it seemed to have pictures of my youngest from infancy to current age while my oldest simply seems to pop into existence at about the age of 3.

As digital pictures and uses for them become more common I think the time has come to start scanning pictures and so I’ve begun what I’m discovering is a much larger task than expected.  I figure if I’m scanning pictures I may as well scan any and all pictures I have.  It makes for some pretty formidable stacks.

I thought today I would write about the picture found at the top of my blog page.  It was taken last July at a friend of my husband’s cabin. They had gotten together for a guys night of scotch and cigars and I had come out with the kids the next morning for a day of swimming.  That’s me fishing off the dock. My oldest daughter is kneeling beside me separating frozen minnows.  My little one is also on the dock just out of camera range running away from the minnows up to my husband sitting on the bank with the somewhat damp dog sleeping beside him. I picked this picture because it never fails to make me smile, it is a perfect moment frozen in time.  I see it and suddenly I can smell the fresh water, feel the warm breeze against my skin and hear the sounds of water lapping against the dock. It’s so rare to capture a moment like this not only in memory but on camera.  It brings back the feeling of contentment that comes from a happy and stress free day.

We had a lot of fun that day, not a single thing went wrong.  Even my little one finding a leech on her turned out well.  Normally she would have flipped, she is what you might call dramatic, but she stayed calm and I got to be proud of her for reacting with interest to see how it came off with salt instead of breaking out in tears.  We went for ice cream, had a BBQ and spent a lot of time in the lake.  It was a hot day and the water was nice and cooling.  We played a game of finding things on the bottom and trying to guess if it was a rock or clam before pulling it up to see.  My oldest found a clam at one point that stuck its foot (?) against her hand as she pulled it out of the water. Her squeal of alarm was hilarious as she tossed it back in. We laughed at the dog as he would go tearing off after the kids as they leapt off the dock then skid to a stop at the end refusing to jump in after them.  He would only walk into the water from the shore,  even after I “encouraged” him by throwing him in a few times. I threw the kids off the dock a few times as well and watched as they had a seaweed fight with their dad.  We spent a lot of that day laughing at and with each other.  

We ended the day fishing.  It was the first time I had been fishing in years and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it. The rhythmic peacefulness of casting and reeling your line is almost hypnotic.  We mostly just fed the fish but we had a lot of fun doing it.

I miss these types of days right now.  As we hunker down in what is beginning to feel like a never ending cold snap waiting for spring to arrive remembering days like this make it a little easier.  We will get back to days like this soon enough and amidst the sparrow sized mosquitoes will remember that winter isn’t so bad either.