regarding memories and pictures

Ezekiel is starting to be potty trained at night, which is a wonderful thing. He came into my bed this morning at 5 am after getting up to use the potty. I love that he still snuggles with us in the mornings sometimes. He's the only one of our kids little enough, or at least who makes himself little enough, that it actually works for us to snuggle with him.

I laid there snuggling with him this morning and suddenly it hit me that I have no pictures of my Grandma Bea, my mom's mom. Or maybe my Grandpa Jack, my mom's dad, for that matter. I didn't mean to think about it but a flood of memories and pictures that I no longer have any photos of washed through my mind. They all burned in our storage fire last year.

I have come to terms with losing my wedding dress and other mementos in the fire. We received compensation from our rental insurance company for quite a few items, and there are others I have replaced with "like kind" items. I have been grateful for the items we have been able to replace and get compensation for. I am typing on our new iMac computer, a replacement for the computer I bought 14 years ago when I first went to college and which was lost in the fire. An old computer for a new one, that was a good trade.

But I am so sentimental. I know nobody else in the world cares about these things, but I am sad that I lost all of my college papers in the fire. All of them. My research paper on the salmon vs. dams issue that was such a hot topic back in 2002 and which won me a scholarship and award while I was at Whitworth. My doctrinal papers that I wrote at Prairie. My senior project on the worldview of Charles Darwin and how it was shaped and how it affected him throughout his life. My integrative seminar paper on holistic ways that the Church can care for the poor within her communities. I still feel like we have too much stuff in our home and I'm always looking for ways to get rid of things, and yet I am so sad that I don't have those papers anymore. When I think about it, I wish I could read them right now.

But this morning ("the smorning" as Rilla would say, one of her few last remaining toddlerish ways of saying things), I am grieving the pictures.

I am an only child of my mother and father. I had their wedding pictures. They are divorced now and I am pretty sure that I had every last wedding picture. The pictures were taken and developed by my Grandpa Jack, ever the photographer. Even before the fire, I had hardly any - if any - photographs of my parents in which they were happy together. But I had their wedding pictures.

They were big wedding pictures, all developed by hand, with big black margins on the sides. Maybe 8" x 10" in measurement, all of them. My parents were married at the Cataldo Mission, the oldest building in Idaho. I always loved that they got married there. My mother was raised Catholic, and she was married in the Catholic mission; my father was a mountain man at heart, and he was married in that historical church, built in mountain man days.

They were married a few days before the end of December in 1983. My mom wore a cream-colored dress with flowers on it and there are pictures, which I loved, of her on the front steps of the mission, standing beside my laughing father, grinning as she held up her dress a bit in front to show her big brown winter boots - White's boots - underneath her wedding dress. It was snowy and the steps were icy.

There are pictures of them laughing and talking with the guests, hardly any of whom I could recognize. Pictures of their kiss at the altar, a simple act which I don't think I have any memories of happening when I was a child. People they were friends with in the early days of their dating and marriage relationship, before my parents couldn't stand each other anymore, before my memories of them always yelling at each other.

I am sad that I don't have those pictures anymore.

I am sad that I don't have the pictures that came afterward. The ones of my dad and Granddad Bud building the cabin where I lived for my first six years. Some very special black-and-white ones of that work that they did by hand, often using antique tools to make a log cabin in the most traditional, old-fashioned sense. The photos of me as a baby, sitting too early in a walker chair, staring at the little pink bear that I loved. The photos of our puppy Smiley that my parents got when I was just a few months old. The photos of hikes that my parents took around their property and around my hometown, probably always taken by a visiting grandparent. My mom often looked suspicious or unhappy then, already, when I wasn't even a year old. I was the one in the picture wearing a knitted cap and knitted sweater and riding in the baby backpack. My dad's hair and beard were still brown then, which I don't even really remember, because he went gray in his 30s, just as I am going gray now. All of the clothes were very early 80s in style, very natural, very fitting with living in a cabin in the woods.

There were just a few pictures of my mom when she was pregnant with me, and a few when I was a tiny baby and she was holding me. With the absurd amount of pictures that I have now of our children and their early years - literally more than a thousand pictures, maybe two thousand, of each of the last six years - it is ludicrous to me to realize now that I have only a few pictures of my own infancy. The ones I have left are in a scrapbook that my grandma made for me when I graduated college, in which she put the pictures she'd kept from the time I was born until Keith and I got married. I'm thankful to have those. And yet they are not the whole picture, only a very small portion of my growing-up years.

As I got older, there were a few pictures of when we lived at the cabin. Our dogs and what the cabin looked like, what it looks like still in my childhood memories that I can't show anyone. Pictures of Walt and Zella, our friends who lived nearby and were like grandparents to me. Pictures of me at Easter time in pretty Easter dresses and holding baskets of eggs. Pictures of me eating ice cream with my best friends Jim and Jessica when we were all preschool age and when my parents used to go visit their parents in Wallace so often. I had a red dress on in those pictures, because I always dressed in my prettiest clothes if I had any say in the matter. Pictures then after my parents got divorced, when my mom and I moved to Coeur d'Alene, pictures of camping with my dad and pictures of swimming or fishing with my mom and Grandpa Jack. So many growing-up pictures. Why did I leave those in storage? There is this one box of pictures that I wish I had brought with me.

There are other losses too that I have tried to be okay with. Keith and I kept all of the cards we were given for our wedding. There were pictures from high school. My senior pictures and the memory pictures that I had from high school and most of college. The college pictures I have left from Whitworth consist of one small album and one online Facebook album that I'd uploaded long ago. Gone are the special cards and letters that I'd kept from those years.

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I had a big print quota left in the computer labs and used it to print off every email that Keith and I had ever written to each other. I had every letter that he'd sent me in college, especially in our freshmen year when we were so far apart and we would write long, philosophizing letters to each other.

There was just so much lost. Most of what I'd kept from my growing-up years was in that fire. My special childhood blanket. I slept with it for years, it was a security blanket to me when I was little and sucked my thumb and my parents fought and I loved that blanket.

We went through all of these things right before we went to Iowa. We spent three days going through everything we had in storage, knowing we didn't want to keep anything that we wouldn't still want many years down the road. We threw away a third of what we had and gave away a third of what we had and we kept the last third. Some of it we brought with us to Iowa, a few useful things here and there, but most of it we left. And I was a little angry by the end of spending three days going through all that. I stared at the boxes we had left at the end and thought, why did we even keep any of it, I feel like I just wasted three days of my life, I don't want to spend my life sorting through things and hanging on to them. But then I thought of the special things that I did, of course, want to hang onto.

There was a journal that I'd written for my future husband before I knew I would marry Keith. My journals from college were special to me too. My prayer journals to the Lord, chronicling so much of what He'd taken me through and special years of deep intimacy and walking with Him. I feel like my walk in recent years has been much more convoluted, messier, less faithful, and it grieved me when I realized those were gone. How will my kids know how closely I walked with Him, I thought. Maybe I should walk with Him that closely again, hmm, so they can actually see how much I love Him, so those years of deep fellowship with Him can be more than a memory. Well, there's a thought.

I had a dream once when Keith and I had been married just a few months. I dreamed that our house was burning down and I was thinking about what I should try to save. At the time I was so enamored with all of our special wedding gifts and I found myself thinking or dreaming about how I would rescue this and that and this and that, right down to the bowls and plates. I woke up and realized how absurd I was, that I had been clinging to all these material things, that I cared about them so much. And I surrendered them to the Lord and was reminded that my treasures are not on earth.

And all of those pictures from our first year of marriage were lost, long ago, when a friend cleaned up our hard drive for us. All the pictures of the sunflowers that Keith planted for me, of dancing together, of making meals together in our first kitchen. And many of our honeymoon photos too, and trips we took and adventures we had in that first year of marriage. That grieved us long ago and it still does grieve me every once in a while, when I realize those pictures are lost.

I wrestled this wanting-to-hold-onto-memories-via-pictures thing out again before the Lord a few months ago. I have a propensity for caring a lot about things. Part of that is probably having been poor when I was young. But I also care a lot about memories. I've kept journals since I was seven years old, sometimes keeping several journals at once to categorize different subjects. Some of those I am not sure whether they burned up in the fire... I do still have one box of things remaining at my parents' house, I think... but I hope they did burn, because they were embarrassingly adolescent, and I will probably go ahead and burn them if I do find them someday!

I find that as a mama, as my kids are older and our life is a little more stable right now, I do still have time to do most of the things that are important to me. There are some things for which it is simply not the right season of life, and I'm fine with that. I enjoy sewing, but I don't mind not having time for it right now. It can wait. The one thing that I've often wrestled with, though, is wanting to have more time to organize and categorize memories. As in, pictures. I absolutely love photography and I have loved taking pictures since I was a child. I had cameras through high school when few other people did. I hardly spent any money in early college but I did make sure that I always had a camera with me. What is the point of going through college, I said, and having all these fun and wonderful experiences, if I don't take pictures of them?

And now we have digital pictures, and I have an overwhelming amount of lovely photos that I can never wade all the way through. We have pictures of our children on two or three different hard drives. One of those crashed and had to be fixed, so now has four copies of each picture, and there are about 84,000 pictures on it. Oh. My. Goodness. Like I will ever in my life have time to look through all of those pictures. Like anyone else will ever have time for that. But they are special to me. I made a good photobook of Priscilla's first year and so most of my favorites, though not all, are in that. But I still haven't made one of Abraham's first year, and of course life has been such a crazy mess since Ezekiel was born that I hardly even have any of his baby pictures printed. I know there are moms who hate the idea of having to do a baby book. But I have always loved it, have looked forward to it all my life. Yet I had to give up on Zeke's baby book because we moved three times before he was 15 months old and I opted to spend my days caring for him rather than trying to catch the memories in pictures.

So, this is something I have really struggled with. Wanting to record every beautiful moment. When Keith and I were engaged, God took me through a season in which He had me stop journaling. I was racing to try to write everything down, to keep track of all that was happening. And He had me just stop. I was glad, it was a relief, because life was happening and it was too big to write down. And it has been that way since having children too, life keeps happening and it is too big to write down, too big to take pictures of it all.

The challenge then for me is when and if to document at all. I am still taking pictures. I'm not journalling much and hardly ever blogging. The problem then is that I have so trained myself to process through writing that I feel I am not processing well when I'm not writing. I feel clogged up, vaguely confused about what's going on.

One of the blessings about the fire is that our insurance company valued all the lost pictures quite highly, but then gave us only 10% of the value. As I now make photobooks and print photos, I can send the receipts in to be reimbursed. A few months ago, for the first time, I had all of my blog posts from this blog printed. I now have three big thick books containing all of these blog posts and all the pictures and memories shared therein, right up to the last post I wrote here in May. It is such a blessing to have those. The pictures are big and in color and I didn't know if I'd ever be able to afford to have those things printed and bound. It is a relief to me and I am so thankful.

But I also recognize that they will eventually pass away. They will burn in a fire or be ruined in a flood or fade to dust. Greater treasures than my words have succumbed to the sands of time. I think that for me, there is an ongoing element of needing to be okay with that. Being good at preserving memories doesn't actually make our lives any better. I love doing it and I do think it matters but in the end, it is the moments that are lived well that matters, not the moments recorded well. What good is it if I stay up all night to make beautiful photobooks if I am tired and cranky and yell at my kids the next day? What good is it if I preserve every memory beautifully but do not live and love well? Not that it has to be an exact dichotomy but it is something for me to consider on an ongoing basis. I want to live and love well, to live for Christ today, to love my husband and children today. Not spend my life trying to hold on to fleeting moments.

As I have flipped through the blog books a little bit, I am surprised by what is there and what is not there. I am thankful for what is there. But I am surprised that the way I remember the years is not there. When Abraham was a baby and Keith and his dad were camping out for weeks at a time that fall, and I was home alone with two little ones under the age of two... the struggles I remember then, how every day took everything I had, those memories are not there! The strain of the following year, when I was pregnant with Ezekiel and Keith was working 18-hour days, those memories are not there, not the same way I remember it happening. Sometimes that is good, because the sweet memories recorded are better than the harder ones in my memory. What is there is special, but it seems like historiography to me in some ways, just one perspective of what happened but not really the whole or full perspective, and in a way it worries me because it seems nearly like a half-truth. Life is so much bigger than can ever be recorded by words or pictures. Each person's experiences are so much more complicated than that.

I suppose I am reflecting on all this again because our life has been settling down a little bit lately and I have turned my thoughts toward sorting through our pictures from our year in Iowa. We were so busy there that I never had time to sort through our pictures even a little bit. So I now have close to 2000 pictures, newly downloaded to our new computer, that I want to go through. I'm not sure whether to try to make a photo book of them or just print the favorites and slap them all in an album.

I'm keeping boxes now too of favorite pictures for each of the kids, not in order or anything, just cute shoebox-sized boxes so that someday, if the boxes aren't destroyed by flood or fire by then, I can hand them boxes of pictures and say, here you go, here's a whole bunch of pictures of you. I am content with doing that rather than making elaborate scrapbooks of their whole lives because... really... even the idea that I could make scrapbooks of their whole lives is absurd.

So. Anyway. I am still coming to terms or grieving a little bit over some of the things lost in the storage fire. And I'm seeking to let it inform me as I move forward. I don't want to waste time on what steals life away, and yet I do want to find a reasonable balance of how to make time to pursue my own hobby of preserving memories through pictures. Real life matters more, but these matter a little too, and I am hopeful that I can find a healthy balance here.