Picture Album

Your memories are the most important thing you own, or at least one of them. People put so much work into keeping track of the things they've done through photographs they snap constantly on vacations, but for me it has always been the way they were arranged in picture albums which made the memories come alive. My parents, when I was growing up, were not exactly what you would call neat people. They kept their photos in boxes upon boxes stacked in the back of the shelves, among tennis rackets, basketballs, hula hoops, childs crafts which we had made when we were young, clothing, and various other random objects. You can just imagine how much stuff was crowded into that closet waiting for a rainy day. And yet, among all that mess, not a single picture album!

One day, on Christmas, my mother wanted to show my aunt a phot of my when I was a kid. Apparently I had just accidently bitten down on a lemon, thinking it was more edible than it really was, and was making the cutest expression. I rolled my eyes, and followed her to the closet to look for the picture. It took us fifteen minutes just to find all the boxes with photos, and although she was sure she knew just where it was, when we tried to find it we couldn't look. We took the boxes downstairs, and began to sort through.

We finally gave up because we couldn't find it. We had spent hours and hours looking for that one danged photograph, but it was no where to be found. Fortunately, my mother had received a picture album from my aunt for Christmas. She was sick of my mom always telling her about these cute pictures and never being able to find them. The picture album was kind of a hint to her.

As soon as our relatives had left, we spent all day going through those photos, sorting them out and putting them in the picture album. When we ran out of room, we quickly went out to get another album. It took us actually a while at first just to decide how to arrange them. At first, we thought we'd arrange them by person, but that quickly proved unsuccessful – there were too many times when more than one of us was in the same picture. Then we thought we'd set them up by year, but that was kind of boring, and besides, the pictures were sort of scattered around and we couldn't always remember what year a particular one was from.

We finally settled on a sort of compromise solution. The ones taken around the neighborhood, or at family gatherings and parties, we arranged by year, while the ones from vacations we arranged by theme – ones in a sunny place, ones on a cloudy day, cute kid pictures, national monuments. When we were done, the picture album was a mess, and we had to re-arrange it several times, but since that day, it has always been much easier to find pictures.