Photos

As we were preparing for the funeral, my Mom asked me to go through old photos of my Grandma and scan them in to make a slideshow.
I knew that my grandmother took nonstop photos, but I really wasn't prepared for what we found.

 Photos were everywhere in her house. She had an entire bookshelf of albums just from the 90s. My favorite were the black-paper-bound scrapbooks she had kept from the 40s through 60s. She had pictures of herself as a pre-teen all the way through when my Mom was a little girl. They all had captions and there were even a few full-page stories written out. I was astounded that when I started removing photos to scan them in, there were usually negatives behind them!

There were boxes and boxes of Kodachrome slides from the 1950s and 60s that I couldn't have gone through even if I had 3 days to look. For some of them, I could get my uncle or mom to tell a story. Others were just precious moments frozen in time 50 years ago.


I had grown up expecting her camera to be out wherever she was. And as I grew older, I started to really not  enjoy having candid photos snapped of me while we were eating dinner. But she would always give us a little album from the previous visit, and I have kept every one. And as I thought about that, I realized that hers are the only photos I have of myself all the way up until I was a teenager.
My grandma's dedication to keeping moments of her own live in a frame has given me memories of my own life. And for that, I am very thankful.

There are so many things I learned about my grandma in the past few weeks that I wish I could have known years ago. If I have a new years resolution this year, it will be to try and actually get to know people.