On this extremely cold and snowy day (at least for this part of the world), I have been doing two things -- shoveling snow, and going through and weeding out old photographs. No, it is not lost on me that over the last week, our nation seems to have gone over a cliff. Perhaps it is because of this that I feel so strongly called to address my blue box of snapshots, and reduce all my remaining belongings as far as possible
I think I have had this box for at least 30 years. Some of the pictures in it were in scrapbooks "back in the day", but I came to realize that the books were too heavy to keep moving around, so -- ta da! -- the pics (and hundreds of subsequent ones) were piled into this box in no particular order, although I did manage to keep them stored vertically. There are a few from junior high school and high school, family events, summers on Lake Champlain, some more from Smith, my year at Royal Holloway, my almost-decade in New York City (I took a photography course at Parsons, so some of these are in moody black-and-white), Pendle Hill, Duluth (my first incarnation there), the Champlain Valley years, and many dozens of my nieces. I don't have many from the last 15 years or so, through the digital age, since I took fewer pictures and they didn't often get printed out.
But if any of you have gone through this process, you know it is an emotional one. As with some of my memorabilia, I've held onto photographs not only to remind myself of the places and people in my varied and unusual journey, but as proof to show others, or as talking points. I've held onto this notion that a granddaughter figure might befriend me before I die, and I could sit with her and go through my pictures, telling her about people, places and situations. As I near 70, the notion that I will have such a person -- or that we will have the leisure to pore over memorabilia -- seems to fade. And these events and people seem almost literally like they are from another lifetime.
(I almost forgot to mention an important thing when I first published a few hours ago. Each picture that I have decided to release to the "no" pile, I have touched, and thanked that person or place for their role in my life. I hated throwing them out on a symbolic level, but when these photos are piled together, they are just too heavy to keep!)
One other comment -- it's been a bit unnerving seeing dozens of photos of my dad, smiling in nearly all of them, looking like the sweetest guy in the world and not quite as I have described him. For the millionth time, I've questioned my own experience, and yet deep down, I trust myself. It's a reminder that things can be -- uh -- complicated.
Tomorrow's chore is to go through the "keep" pile one more time, both to put the pictures in some sort of order, and to further weed out duplicates and others. This isn't serving to put the unconscionable cruelty of this moment out of mind, but it does ready me to be agile enough to serve the Goddess and the spirit of Love, moving forward.
