It
is a fun ritual to look through the photos of the past year, deciding which to
include in each calendar, and remembering some of the things we’ve seen and
done. A year’s worth of photographs stretches from winter outings into
springtime mud puddles, summer fun, the colors and activities of fall, and back
to winter again. Around we go.
Every
photograph offers a glimpse into one moment of time, and each one evokes
emotions and memories. Every image comprises a story, or at least the
introduction to a story. Of course, the moments we photograph and save are
generally the happy ones, whether big events or impromptu clicks of the camera
during good times. In this way, we commemorate the joyful and proud moments and
ignore the less-than-cheery events.
Looking
through photo files of the year gone by takes me quite a while, as I become
sidetracked by the details I’ve already forgotten, things that would likely
fade from memory without those images to hold them: the
happy-and-a-little-bit-nervous smiles of the first day of school, giggling walks
through the lupine field, spontaneous living room dance parties.
Contained
in the 2013 collection are a summer week on Cape Cod, an autumn trek to
Montreal, visits from the cousins from Tennessee and California, a wedding
celebration, and plenty more: bike rides, hikes, holiday festivities, jumping
into leaf piles, skiing through snowy glades, the intricacies of constructing
fairy houses and decorating the Christmas tree.
Looking
beyond the most recent set of photographs to images from years past, I remember
my children’s toothless baby grins, how crazy the littlest one’s hair was when
she was tiny, the furrowed brow my son often wore as an infant, and that the sweet-bordering-on-mischievous
gleam in my eldest daughter’s eyes is the same now as it was in her earliest
months.
I
remember how my children, as toddlers, loaded freshly harvested carrots and
potatoes into their Tonka trucks and carted them from the garden to the house,
the springtime bouquets of bright dandelions they picked, their first snow
angels, my then-2-year-old son teaching his baby sister to crawl, that baby’s
first bike ride without training wheels, how grown up my daughter seemed in the
costume for her first dance recital.
In
photographs I see that some of the outings my family enjoys now are similar to
the adventures I had as a kid. I have a picture of myself around age 6 helping
my father build something, and one of my son at the same age wielding a hammer
with his grandfather. I have a photograph of the pigtailed little girl I was
sitting at the top of a hike with my mom, and one of my own two daughters in
nearly the same spot with her a few decades later.
Around
and around we go.
The
kids will clamor to flip through the new calendars when they arrive, before we
wrap them up and put them under the tree, remembering together some of the fun
of the year just passed. They also love looking through the older calendars and
the baby books, finding within the pages their smaller selves and remembering
the stories contained in these photographs.
As
the year comes to a close, the 2013 calendar will join the small stack of
calendars from previous years, which we’ll dig out of the closet every now and
then, flipping through the memories. And before the 2014 calendar is unwrapped
and hung on the wall, we’ll have begun taking the next round of pictures,
creating new stories as a new year glistens on the holiday horizon.
So
the world turns. Around and around we go, snapping photographs, holding onto
moments, and replaying memories along the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment