Welcome to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes? Every month a group of six bloggers share their work-spaces, homes, towns, and more!

This month we’re sharing some of our photo album memories.

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever…it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” ~ Aaron Siskind

Pulling pictures out of albums to share with family and friends…

As regular readers know, I’ve been selling off/getting rid of a LOT of things. One thing I’ve been slowly going through is photo albums – of which there are MEN. NEE. I’ve been dismantling them, taking all the photos out, tossing near duplicates (did I really need to take TEN pictures of Katie laying on her changing table, laughing at the Pee Wee Herman doll? Well, I mean, YES…but do I need to KEEP all ten??), scanning the “keepers,” and sending the hard copies off to family and friends.

Many different album categories: friends, family…the bottom one is like a portfolio from when I did wedding and party flowers in the 90s

I wish I’d taken a picture of all the albums before I started this process cuz I’ve already thrown out three or four, now emptied.

House pictures, parties – the bottom was the cake my sister made for Katie for her May Day themed-birthday party

I was always “the picture taker.” Someone (I’m guessing my father?) gave me a Kodak Instamatic box camera when I started high school (ish). I loved that camera, and it was almost always hanging off my wrist with the handy wrist strap. So I have many pictures of friends, pets, houses, family throughout my lifetime…but very few of ME, ha ha. Cuz I was always the one taking the picture. These days almost everyone has a cell phone with a camera so everyone takes pictures of one another, which is nice.

An early album from my high school years: friends, prom, horses…my friend’s cat who used to pee on the stove burner so it gave off a hot pee smell when you used the stove. But he was a sweetheart.

BUT – gone are the days of photo albums and boxes filled with prints and negatives (or, in the case of my father, slides). People just leave pictures in their phones…or store them in the cloud…but to my mind, there is nothing like physically flipping through the pages of a photo album or stacks of photo prints.

LOTS of horse, riding, and animal albums.

My grandmother always had her five or six photo albums on a side table in the living room, beside a light grey-blue velvet-covered cushy rocker. I loved rocking there for hours every summer, going through the pictures, asking the questions: “who’s this?” “where were you?” etc, and learning about my family’s history in that way.

Family. I think I have that exact navy and white striped shirt of my mother’s right now, ha ha.

Side note: she always had pictures of Debbie Reynolds tucked into the albums, like she was family. I loved that 🙂

Family, work friends, baby pictures

But now…pictures are sequestered away on our cell phones, they’re not just out in the open for people to flip through. And I think this is sad. An injustice to photos and people’s histories. I feel like Katie doesn’t know much about my history, our family’s history, because there were no pictures to prompt interest and question-asking.

So I’ve been trying to PRINT more. I have a dish on the table inside the front door that I keep photo prints in, as well as postcards, flyers from events I attended, etc. Sort of a memory box. I have it there for visitors…but I’m the only one who rifles through them from time to time, allowing them to bring back memories of times I’ve had with friends and family.

In addition to all my other projects (don’t know whether to laugh or cry), I think I’ll try to make a photo story book for Katie…as much of the story of our family as I can put together through pictures and captions. Something she can hold in her hands and flip through from time to time. To know who and what she comes from.

Dog show album, with pictures and score sheets.

My “Russell & Bettye Story” album. Yes, I still have that. It’s part of my experience and history. I keep trying to move it off to Katie but she’s not having it just yet. She’ll take it eventually.

The Russell & Bettye Story wasn’t all sparkles and sunshine, ha ha.

But it did culminate in a wonderful human. This was a week before I had Katie. Oofah.

Hee hee, Katie and the Pee Wee Herman doll (those are his white shoes). She (and I) LOVED him!!!

The photos exceed the albums. These boxes hold file folders of photographs and SLIDES GALORE. I have managed to winnow down from 4 external hard drives of photographs to 2. There is a bag under my desk at work with easily 2 dozen rolls of FILM to develop, from back in the day. My PHONE has 10,000 pictures. My COMPUTER has thousands of pictures. Pictures pictures EVERYWHERE. Memories. Everywhere.

Memories Everywhere. That’s kinda nice, right??

Make sure to check out my friends blogs today, too:

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Leslie at Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own