Of pictures and picture albums

Today's thoughts have been on pictures and picture albums.  Remember 35mm film?  You took pictures, carried the finished roll to the drugstore, had them developed and then took home that magical little envelope full of highly prized pictures of your trip to Disney, or the kids playing in the backyard, or birthday celebrations, or stupid things you cat did (half of which are blurry pictures as your cat is not a willing participant in the picture taking process). But they were expensive and you really had to think about taking them because every picture had quite a bit of cost associated with them.  Now pictures are almost a dime a dozen.  You can take hundreds of pictures with your phone or digital camera.  You can now select which pictures (if any) you decide to print. 

And then there are the scrapbooks or photo albums into which you carefully (or haphazardly) put them.  You might spend hours creating one page that has three pictures on it, carefully cutting out half-inch letters and meticulously gluing them with acid free permanent glue (which you later find out isn't living up to the 200 year archival stickiness that the package said it would).  You have striven to make masterpieces of pictures of your child's first steps with witty sayings such as "One Small Step for Mankind" or philosophical "A Journey Begins with the First Step." 

I have boxes and boxes of these kinds of things.  I have scrapbooks that haven't been worked on in four years.  I have pictures that date back to my childhood that I truly need to rescue from the horrible acid-laced "magnetic" albums from the 70's.  I have files of (mostly unorganized) pictures of my children from in utero to around 2008 or 2009.  Then we got a digital camera.  And then phones on our cameras.  So we have thousands of picture files on several different computers.  I don't think I have printed a picture other than one or two to frame (such as the picture I have of my kids on the beach the week before the BP oil spill in 2010) since 2009. 

Part of me wants to take those pictures and albums with me and dedicate a time each week to making order of them and weeding out pictures and putting them properly into some sort of album, even if just a binder with sleeves) so that they can be enjoyed.  The other part says, "Why bother?"  I'm trying to come to a happy medium with both of these voices.  I want to bother because those are records of my children's lives and I have this horrid fear that I may one day be like my grandmother and not remember.  I see my own mother starting to have memory issues.  What if I forget?  That would truly be sad.  I want them to be beautiful, but I first want to preserve them.  Neatly rather than in the jumble they currently are. 

Of course in the next couple years we will get to how I manage that.  For now they are going to be packed and taken with me.  And hopefully one day they will be a treasure rather than a burden.  Something I love rather than something I feel obligated to tote around the country with me.