What's Worth a Thousand Pictures...

In the corner of my living room sit 4 of those huge storage containers. What's in them? Pictures. Old photo albums, framed portraits, loose photographs. All inherited from my in-laws' home months ago when I had every intention to get them all sorted, filed, albummed and re-distrubed to hubby's brothers. I still have the intention, and now I have a deadline--next weekend. But that's not what this post is about.

I was looking through one of the albums tonight, and they were, page after page of family and friends wearing short courdory shorts and OP T-shirts. Feathered hair, tube socks, orange furniture in a room decorated with a powerful conquistadore theme. Hubby wasn't with me as I looked, so I had noone to tell me who any of these people were. I could recognize his brothers, but that's about it. The cousins are all strangers.

Then, on the next few pages came the dogs. One after another, pictures of the family pets, each carefully labelled with its name and the date of the photograph. And I thought to myself, this is crazy! Who cares about the dogs? Who are these people? But then it came clear to me...I'm sure when Jean put these pictures on the sticky pages, it never occurred to her that anybody would have any trouble identifying the people in them. They were constant familiar faces in her life. They were comfortable in her home. They were family--blood and other.

Earlier today I spent the afternoon at a friend's house, my son and some other children swam in the pool for a good part of the day. Like the dutiful mother, I snapped pic after pic. As soon as I got home, I uploaded and emailed them. And I had this vision...someday, far in the future, is my son going to be zipping through a dusty hard-drive, looking at these images, vaguely remembering the day, and wondering...who are these other kids? Now, I can easily delete these, but I'm stuck with the dilemma of hundreds of photos and nobody (not even hubby) knows who's in the picture. It's a lot easier to delete than toss...