A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words

I love looking at old photo albums!  My mom keeps all of her old albums in the hall closet, and it is one of the first places I go when we visit every summer.  This summer it seemed especially important to see them since it was the first summer visit since my father's death.  Looking at pictures from my childhood just seemed to bring him closer.

My mom also had a "little job" for my husband.  (She always has little things she likes him to do when he visits- the man can fix or figure out how to work just about anything)  This time she had purchased a gadget  from QVC that would scan your old photos and put them on a memory card.  My mom is the queen of  QVC shopping but that's another story.  Anyway she wanted Ralph to figure out how to work it which he did.

Going through all those pictures and scanning them was definitely an emotional roller coaster type experience.  Seeing my dad the way he was before the Alzheimer's made us smile but it was also a reminder that he was longer with us.  Ralph and the girls had not heard all of the stories behind the photos so I think they enjoyed the glimpses into our past.

One backstory seemed to sum up my personality as a child pretty well- at least according to my mom.  My dad had purchased one of the very first Polaroid cameras from a coworker. (It was the kind you had to rub the picture with some chemical and wait for it to appear.)  He was constantly taking pictures of us.  Not being the most patient child or the most tolerant of things I felt were stupid, this was a real source of annoyance for my 8 year old self.  One weekend morning I had just taken a bath.  My hair was wet and I was wearing a bathrobe.  For some reason he wanted to take  pictures that morning.  Probably because my 3 year old brother looked so adorable in his footed jammies and his "porcupine" hair sticking up everywhere.  But I was NOT feeling adorable.  The first picture went OK but just as he went to shoot the next one I said in a voice just loud enough to be heard by all, "I just ought to stick my bare ass up in the air."

There were no more photos taken that morning.

(This is not THE photograph but I think you get the idea- doesn't everyone look pleased with me!)