Birthday Books

On a bookshelf in our family room, there are several photo albums wedged together. Some of these comprise photos I printed out (from film) and placed between the pages myself. There’s one from high school, a couple from my college years, and more from my post-college adventures in Colorado and Ireland.

The other albums are collections of childhood photos my mother gave me years ago. She was a master photo album-maker throughout the years of my childhood, keeping visual records of every trip we took, various childhood milestones, birthday parties and ski races, soccer camps and hiking trips – all compiled by year and labeled neatly. And then, several years ago, she took these apart, reassembled them by child, and gifted books to my brothers and me.

I once had great aspirations of keeping similar photo albums – thus, the college and immediately post-college years represented on my shelf. But then life got busier – and digital photos came into being. While I love the ease of taking and sharing images now, I rarely have them printed out anymore, let alone put neatly into albums with each event carefully labeled.

My husband and I were married 15 years ago, right around the time digital was really pushing film photography out of the way. In our bedroom, I have a box of wedding photos – something like 600 hundred of them – along with a lovely album that may someday contain those photos. And, while my older two children have a lovely baby book, my youngest has envelopes of photos somewhere that I may someday locate and organize into a book.

But – every year, each kid gets a book for his or her birthday. The photos are not individually printed and carefully placed between sticky-backed paperboard and clingy plastic cover, nor are they tucked by those little corner tabs onto pages. Rather, I download my photos onto a website, compile them there onto virtual pages, and then, through some photo site magic, they are printed directly onto pages, bound into a personalized book, and shipped to my doorstep.

This is not quite the same as the old photo albums, of course. The kids won’t be able, decades from now, to pull out a photo and turn it over to see if there are names or a date penciled carefully onto the back. But they serve as a record, nonetheless, and they have become a beloved birthday tradition – for both the receivers and the giver.

The kids like to turn the pages – quickly on the first look, then more slowly – to remember what they’ve done over the past 12 months, where they’ve been, and with whom. Like the photos from my childhood, these images show soccer games and skiing buddies, treks through the mountains, family trips and gatherings, sleepovers and time spent with friends. There are often sighs of happy contentment and a few giggles as the kids turn through the year just passed.

Making the books is time-consuming, and it is often agonizing to whittle the hundreds of digital photos I’ve taken over the course of a year down to a much smaller number that will fit within a book. But I love to go through those photos and remember, too. It’s a reminder to take a deep breath and enjoy these moments, even as they seem to fly by.

Often, on their birthdays, or after the birthday chaos has quieted some, the kids will go into the other room, pull out the collection of books from earlier birthdays, and flip through those as well. I think they like to remember how little they once were – to them it seems like forever ago, to me just the other day – to see traditions unfold across the years and new adventures mixed in.

Sometimes, one of my children will mention a place I’ve been to or a person I’ve shared stories with, and I’m able to pull a dusty album off the shelf and find a photo of that time, place, or personality. I hope these birthday books stand the test of time and go with my children wherever they wander. Then, someday, they can pull a book off a shelf, remember and share the stories held within.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay was published in the Littleton Record as Meghan's Close to Home column on February 14, 2020.

Sorting Memories

Over the past few months, I have been picking away at the colossal project of organizing my office. As I’ve taken to working on my laptop in more convenient (and less messy) locations, this third-floor room has lately become a dumping ground for various stuff. Old camping gear and mismatched picture frames were chucked haphazardly into one of the small closets. Files and writing clips and photographs for unassembled albums were stacked in every corner. To hide the clutter, I would simple close the door and pretend it didn’t exist.

But this summer I have finally taken it on. I’ve cleaned out many years’ worth of junk from the closets. I’ve sorted my children’s art work and other keepsakes neatly by year into individual storage containers. I’ve recycled hundreds of gift boxes, which I’m not sure why I saved in the first place, since I’m a lazy present wrapper who generally skips the box and goes straight for the paper.

Amid the muddled mess were several boxes of personal items returned to me when my parents moved into a smaller house. For four years, these have been sitting in a disheveled heap in the corner of the office farthest from my desk. Occasionally I’ve peaked into a box to find an old journal or photograph. Inevitably, I’d end up sitting on the floor, flipping pages and digging through memories until one of the kids called for me or I remembered there was something on the stove or an appointment to keep.

The boxes contained my high school and college diplomas, VHS tapes of school performances, college reports, old ski passes, and faded sepia photographs of my great-grandparents (which will someday be hung in the hallway, if I ever get around to painting it). Some of these relics from the past have been easily sorted into the throw away pile, others reorganized and packed away more neatly.

Then there are the letters.

Over the past several days I have sorted through thousands of letters filed into shoeboxes and Christmas cards bundled by brittle rubber bands. The correspondence stretches back a bit longer than 20 years – before e-mail, certainly before abbreviated text messages. Some of the letters came from friends, a few from people I don’t now remember, and many from my parents, who were loyal correspondents of the news from home during the decade I spent elsewhere.

There are graduation cards and wedding cards, 20 years of Christmas greetings and birthday wishes, dozens of congratulatory notes from when my children were born, thank yous from kids I coached or people whose stories I shared in newspaper articles. The majority of these letters and notes have found their way to the recycling bin. But before I toss them away, I’m reading each one, gaining glimpses into different periods of my life, difficult to recall as I make my way through the now.

The biggest collection of letters arrived in my college mailbox during my first year away from home. These letters from my childhood friends are filled with all the insecurities and anxiety of being away from home – and from each other – for the first time in our lives. Amid hastily scrawled lines of uncertainty are stories from college, of classes and parties, new classmates and potential romances.

Most of the news contained within these letters is irrelevant now, more than two decades later. But I have enjoyed reading them, trying to remember the girl I was then – one who had great friends, was crazy about soccer, and had some kind of cow fetish. (So many soccer books and magazines. So many cards featuring cows!) One hockey-crazed friend wrote the names of Boston Bruins players in the return address instead of his own. Another sent me 15 handmade birthday cards one year. Many called me by nicknames I’d long ago forgotten.

As we all grew more comfortable in our worlds away from home, the letters evolved from college angst to news of new friends, anticipation of graduation, then the beyond-college adventures of 20-somethings moving to cities or out west, tackling grad school or med school or new jobs.

By then, e-mail was becoming prevalent, and long letters became increasingly rare. (One exception was the blue air mail envelopes containing pages-long letters filled with the left-handed-slanting scrawl of my former soccer coach in England and all the news of what was happening across the ocean, along with newspaper clippings with the scores and standings of English soccer leagues.) But occasional brief notes and stacks of Christmas cards each December still arrived in the mailbox. Eventually the notes and cards contained word of impending weddings, professional achievements, the arrival of children.

In my parents’ letters, their excitement and joy at my accomplishments and adventures is practically palpable, as is their shared disappointment and worry during challenging or indecisive times. My mother caught me up on what my brothers were doing, which friends of mine she’d run into recently around town, and other day-to-day happenings. My dad’s letters are a bit shorter and generally a little goofy. These contained soccer advice, notes on my finances, and reminders to get the oil changed in the truck.

I’m nearly through the boxes now. The journals will be filed by date and tucked into one of the cleaned-out closets along with a few photographs I’ll save. The school reports have, for the most part, been discarded. Most of the letters that filled three good-sized boxes have been recycled, and those saved now fit into one much smaller box.

Sorting through so many memories has made me feel a bit older, sometimes melancholy, often contently nostalgic, and relatively stationary. For a decade after leaving the only town I’d ever called home, I moved – beyond the region, across the country, abroad. The items contained in those boxes documented each new phase: the college freshman thrilled at making the soccer team, the graduate heading to the mountains of Colorado, the traveler moving to the west of Ireland, and – eventually – the New England girl coming home, getting married, starting a family.

Now, I’ve lived in the same house for nearly 10 years – longer than I’ve lived anywhere other than my childhood home. My parents are around the corner. New friends have come into my life and others faded away, although I’m still in touch with many of those who wrote me letters a long time ago, before we turned to shorter e-mail messages, fleeting texts, and notes passed through Facebook.  

I’m not sure what compelled me to save all those cards and letters, or why I am content now to let most of them go. Perhaps I was afraid of losing track of where I’d been or who I was. Probably it was just easier to move the boxes than to unpack them. Either way, it’s been good to sort through the memories while cleaning house – to hold on and let go all at once.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. A version of this essay also appears in the August 22, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

A year's worth of memories

Amid the tree trimming, letters to Santa, cookie making, and present wrapping madness of the holidays, I take a trip each year down memory lane, perusing photographs from the past 12 months in the process of creating photo calendars for family members.

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.

Original content, posted by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted to her Blog: Writings From A Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the December 13, 2013 edition of the Littleton Record.

Comfort and Joy

Early this week my youngest daughter was sick. Normally spirited and silly, she spent a couple of days sad and tired and on the couch, cuddled up with two favorite items given as gifts. The first is her pink, pajama-clad stuffed dog, given to her when she was only a few days old by her Aunt Laura, and which she sleeps with every night. The other is “Auntie Carol’s blanket,” given to us last Christmas by someone who has known me since I was new to the world.

Auntie Carol is not technically my aunt, but the woman who was my next door neighbor for the first 18 years of my life, and who adopted the entire neighborhood to love. My children have met Auntie Carol only a couple of times, but they adore the soft, cream-colored blanket she crocheted for us. Perhaps they can feel the love of this woman who is kind and gentle and one of the most truly sweet people I have ever known. Whatever she put into that blanket has made it a coveted treasure in our home, and one that brought a semblance of comfort to a sad little girl with a fever and sore throat.

We all have gifts that are cherished for the comfort and joy they bring to us. Some of them are favorites for a short while, others for a lifetime.

For my 25^th birthday, my mother gave me the diamond from her own mother’s engagement ring, strung on a simple gold chain. I have worn that necklace on the rare occasion that I am dressed up, but also when I need a little extra luck or support. It belonged first to my grandmother, and so when it hangs from my neck, I feel her spirit is with me. I wore it on my wedding day, along with the diamond studs my almost-husband presented to me the night before, which were a perfect match.

When I had my first babies – twins – my friend Becky, who has been my buddy since we were ourselves wee babes, sent me a ridiculously soft robe and super cozy socks. Another time, those gifts would have been just plain nice. But at that exact point in my life they were a touch of luxury when I felt both happy and exhausted, but certainly not luxurious.

Some of my favorite gifts now are those that remind me of my past, distant or recent. My mother

has given me albums filled with photographs from my childhood through to my children’s first years. My son and daughters love to look at these photos, to see how Mama and Uncle Billy and Uncle Michael looked as kids, and what Nana and Poppy looked like years before they became grandparents. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and just as many emotions.

Tucked away here and there, in my office, in the drawer of my bedside table, in the basket on the kitchen counter that holds various “stuff,” are little treasures from my children. Birthday cards made before they could write, self-portraits of each of them drawn in crayon with perfect u-shaped smiles and big ears and no noses, notes in washable marker declaring, “I love Mama.”

Those love notes are mere scribbles to anyone but me. My Nana’s diamond is just a diamond to anyone else, but it is a sentimental treasure to me, just as the earrings my husband gave me are special because they were his last gift to me before we married, left on my pillow on the eve of our wedding. The photographs from my past contain my memories, and those of my family. The super-soft robe from Becky is special because she knew, at that exact moment in my life, that I needed something warm and soft and easy. Auntie Carol’s blanket is simply a blanket made from neat rows of soft yarn, but for me and for my children, it represents the comfort of home. 

The best gifts are not necessarily the ones that come in the biggest box or tied with the prettiest ribbon. The best gifts are the ones that bring us joy and comfort, whether through touch, familiarity, promises of the future, or memories recalled.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted on her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears in the March 8, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.