Memory Monday: Photos in Our Family

PHOTOS IN OUR FAMILY

My mother always loved pictures—having her own taken and taking pictures of her family. I remember how she would take us kids outside—in the bright sunlight, and then tell us to open our eyes so she could take our picture. (Later, by the time her grandchildren came along, she had a camera with a flash, so all those lovely darlings didn’t have to go outside and open their eyes wide.) Through the years when money was tight, she would save up until she could afford to send off several rolls of film and get prints made. When she passed away, I found a lot of pictures of Mother from her teens forward. Even after my father passed away, she kept getting her picture made every couple of years at our Walmart photo studio. I also found all those envelopes with strips of negatives from the rolls of film she sent off to get printed from the fifties through the eighties or nineties.

Well, I never was interested in taking pictures, but my husband was. Which is fortunate for our children, otherwise we wouldn’t have any pictures to display when we had a celebration for our son’s Eagle Scout ceremony or a video to show of our daughter growing up for her wedding.

Recently, my husband got a new camera—his first in years. He’s still learning how to use it. He did get an interesting picture of our granddaughter. It’s the one shown above. By the way, she is wearing the glasses from the Potato Head toys that my children played with. And she insists on wearing them upside down. Ahh, young ones—when they set their minds on something, you can’t change them.

While I’m not interested in taking photos, I am so thankful that there are others in our family who do. This way the generations to come will have faces to put with names as they look back at those who came before them.