When we moved to our new (smaller) house, we tossed a lot of stuff in an effort to downsize. Much of it was redundant junk – stuff we didn’t use in the first place but then got duplicates of, like cheese boards and boot stretchers. Then there was the stuff we don’t use often, but had multiple versions: I don’t, for example, iron clothes a lot, but somehow I ended up with three steam irons. Two of them had to go. (I did insist we keep a backup coffee maker, and it has come in handy twice now when the whiz-bang, rocket-engineered version we bought with the house crapped out on us and had to be repaired. You gotta have coffee, thus, you gotta have a backup coffee maker.)
It’s an odd thing, this going-through-and-disposing project. I find myself re-living parts of my life, remembering things I’d forgotten and things I’d rather not have remembered. Each artifact I dig up out of some old footlocker or filing cabinet tells a little part of my life. Do I really want to scrap that? If my memory starts to devolve in the next few years, would these little things help me to piece together who I am and what I’ve been through?
Well, a coffee maker probably wouldn’t. But a photograph might.
Which brings me to the heart(break) of the problem. About three weeks ago I scavenged the house (combed the archaeological dig site) for all of the photographs, so that I could determine what to keep and what to scrap. I ended up with three big cartons. Then I went through said photos, one at a time, to see if I wanted to keep them – if they recalled a moment for me that I wanted to savor in years to come.
Note. The husband does not collect, or look at, or want, old photographs. Has absolutely no interest in them. So he did not have to take part in this excavation, nor did I have to run any of the proposed disposal by him. He Just. Doesn’t. Care. So please don’t think I am railroading this past him. If you’re skeptical, just ask his older brother, or better yet, the brother’s wife, who is now the Unofficial Keeper of the Golden Family photos. In a very large trunk. That she can’t get rid of.
Back to the cartons. Now, in my youth, I was The One With the Camera. I didn’t always know how to use it, and I didn’t always use it right, but I took a LOT of photos. And now, 45-plus years later, I have no idea what they are photos OF. Many are just landscapes – random mountains that I shot on some family vacation; a waterfall; a field with horses in it. I am clueless as to where they were taken, or why. I’m sure I just thought they were bucolic (a word I didn’t even know back then) and worth saving on film.
Note 2. This was back in the days of negatives. Which I also kept. Which also take up room in these three cartons.
Some of them were photos of people I seldom saw and can’t for the life of me recall who they are now. People with whom I have had no contact for decades.
And some are memories I’d rather forget. I’ll just leave it at that. You may have a few of those of your own.
So I can toss all of those with no regrets. But then there’s the others…photos of the husband and me on early camping trips, when we didn’t have a dime but life was still good. Pictures of my mom as a girl; my dad as a soldier. Their honeymoon photos. Do I want to save those, to think that my mom and dad actually had some tender moments early on before the bad times? And photos even before that – of my grandmother as a girl, in a long dress, high-button shoes and a cameo at her neck, in the photographer’s parlor. Before that, HER father’s civil war regiment. And so on. Are those worth saving?
In the end, I made an initial culling. Saved the potsherds of a few lives and tossed those that have no meaning. I got it down to one carton and stuck that box back into the corner of a closet that is already over-full, like the archives of a natural history museum that has too many kangaroo rat carcasses and will need to get rid of some. I know that I’ll need to do it again in a few years, and hope I will have the mental and emotional strength to do it then. And for right now, I feel like I’ve accomplished something.
But deep down, I know it’s not nearly enough. If anything happens to me – as it eventually will – these photos will mean nothing to those who come after. Which is the saddest part of all.