I’ve been in a state of trying to organize personal photos for what seems like years….probably because it has been years. Recently, I felt like I was making some headway with the purchase of a few more external hard drives where I’ve been trying to catalog photos by each month of each year. There’s the narrowing down of which images might not be worth saving and which ones are keepers but not likely to be printed and which ones should definitely be printed.
It’s the images I’d forgotten about altogether though that always seem to slow down the process. I inevitably let out a big nostalgic sigh a few times a night during the organizing process and my husband knows that I’m going to be turning my laptop screen towards him so that then we can sigh nostalgically together about how little they were, how 2 years ago feels like 2 weeks ago sometimes.
It goes too fast. Time marches on and we all know this. We predictably acknowledge it at the milestone events or on birthdays and so we whip out our cameras and take lots of pictures at those gatherings. And we should because those days do matter and after all, it’s often those times when you can get everyone together in one room or one big backyard. But the truth is, we live at least 95% of our lives in the everyday moments that are in between those highlights.
Along the way in my sorting, I come back over and over again to this image. It was March of 2011 and Zoe was 19 months old. It was a warm day for March but it was windy. It was late afternoon along the Charles River right across the street from Harvard Square. She was at that age where everything that she saw blew her mind and this was a sensory wonderland. I wandered around with her, seeing everything through her eyes. Then she made her way over to a bike rack where the photo was taken and she loved that so much that we must have stayed there for 20 minutes. She ran laps around it, poked her face through it, climbed on it and marveled with glee at the whole thing. It wasn’t her birthday or a holiday and it wasn’t her first time doing anything in particular but everyday life somehow gets elevated to the greater status that it deserves when you take a picture of one of those “little” moments.
I’m glad I had my camera with me.
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Alice PaduchIt’s always the little moments. You will gather so many that some will get lost and reappear in your mind. Snippets and threads that tangle your brain.