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.

New Gig, New Digs

I started a new job last week. Since my twins were born – 13 years ago – I’ve worked primarily as a freelance writer. This has allowed me to (mostly) work around the kids’ schedules, from pre-preschool through elementary school, soccer practices through sick days from school, toddling to as-tall-as-I-am. It’s also meant that most days I have worked from the home office – and sometimes the dining room table.

The new gig allows some work-from-home time, which is great. It also involves two days in an actual, not-at-home, office, which is also great. But it’s a transition. I haven’t had to commute regularly, at least not beyond the two flights of stairs from the main floor to the upstairs office, for 13 years. I’ve gone to work in my slippers, or flipflops, depending on the season, for more than a decade.

Last Monday, I climbed into the car in work clothes and real shoes, full travel coffee cup in hand, and headed along the backroads between New Hampshire and Vermont to a new (to me) office in an unfamiliar town. Along the way from home to work I drive through a handful of other small towns, past houses older than our republic, along fields mowed for generations and rivers older than time.

And then I arrive in a quaint New England village not unlike myriad other quaint New England villages dotting the landscape from the northern mountains to the eastern seashore. There is a tall, white-clapboarded church standing next to a small green, with a general store just across the road from the old house where my office sits. Mine is a room upstairs, on the right, with two green-shuttered windows looking toward the neighboring house, a placement very similar to my childhood bedroom in the 1720s house where I grew up (in another small town in a different state).

My second day at the office, I headed out for a fresh air fix. My colleague suggested I explore the short trail through conserved land just behind the office. So I walked a little ways down a quiet road, then turned into the woods and continued on a path that followed a river (I don’t know, yet, the river’s name) and traversed tall trees and giant glacial erratics.

I was happy to learn of this path so close to the office, and I expect I’ll walk there many times as the seasons shift. Eventually I popped back out onto Route 10, walking past the elementary school and the post office, then stopping into the general store to peruse the offerings.

The driver of the first car to pass me when I returned to the road waved as if I were an old friend. Perhaps she thought I was someone else. But I like to think it’s a small town thing that – like the school and the general store, the church and the common – translates from one place to another. Whatever the reason behind the wave, it contributed to the feeling of welcome I felt in this unfamiliar-familiar landscape, a bit further from home than I’m used to being. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 24, 2020 issue of the Littleton Record.

Shifting Normal

I have a confession to make: I don’t always know what to write about.

I consider this space, which I’ve filled twice a month for the past nine years, to be a place of mostly happy, occasionally bittersweet, musings. I’ve written about gardening and hiking, skiing and stargazing, loving pets and raising kids. These are the things, often, that fill my time.

But there are weeks when I come up blank. Maybe, if you’re a regular reader here, you’ve noticed some columns – the weeks when I struggle to find relevant subject matter – are a bit less zippy than others. Then again, the columns I consider mundane are often the ones people seem to like best. I guess there is value in the everyday.

I often dismiss the ideas that come to mind for various reasons. The kids don’t always want the details of their day-to-day lives shared, and I have to respect that. I don’t like to write about anything political, because there are other places for that – and, quite frankly, I’ve never been all that great at persuasive writing. There are things that happen in my world that I sometimes want to write about, but can’t figure out how – or that I figure no one really wants to read about anyway.

And there are weeks like this, where anything I’d care to share seems, well, just plain trivial.

Australia is on fire and has been for weeks. Closer to home, the weather is all sorts of out-of-whack in what feels like a new normal – until it changes again. It’s snowing as I write this, but we’ve only had a few very cold days this season, and Saturday’s temps are forecasted to top 50 degrees. There’s no longer any such thing as a January thaw, because we’re in a repeating freeze-thaw cycle.

There is political discontent everywhere you turn. It’s exhausting on so many levels – and we haven’t even made it to the First In The Nation Primary yet. 

The kicker is that my children have asked me several times this week if we are on the brink of World War III. For all you grownups out there who think kids aren’t paying attention – well, they are. They hear more than we think they do, and they understand more than we adults often give them credit for. And this is the stuff, sometimes, of playground conversations.

This week, it just feels like writing about the snowy woods or the busy holiday break just passed or the joys and struggles of raising almost-teenagers is a bit like ignoring the many elephants in the room. And yet it is that ordinariness – getting the kids up and out of the house in the mornings, meeting work deadlines, driving the Mom Uber – that keeps us moving forward.

Somedays the weight of the world is heavy, no matter how little of it each of us is charged with carrying. It is hard, on those days, to know what to do or say or even feel.

And so I carry on, as people have forever, with the day-to-day. I go into those snowy woods with the dog. I ski and write and watch the kids play in the snow. I help with homework (when I can) and figure out what to make for dinner. I snuggle with the animals and love the kids and keep looking up at that starry sky. And all the while, Normal keeps shifting. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 10, 2020 issue of the Littleton Record.