Picture this!

If you have been in my apartment recently you know that I have pictures everywhere. I start out with each of the four children at six months old and those same children in the same order as they graduated from high school. The oldest three graduated from Butler but the youngest graduated further north at Savanah. It was a bit of a surprise that they all didn’t graduate from the same school but at least all four of them did have some of their education in Butler but only Susan went to and graduated from the school in Savanah.

Now that we have started on grandchildren and great-grandchildren I have found out that including Lester and me we have been influenced and graduated from The School of the Ozarks and Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C., Butler, Savanah, and some in Kansas and Texas and soon to be Neosho and Nevada. You can imagine the number of graduation pictures that grace our walls.

Recently our son Mark discovered many of my father’s pictures tucked away when we moved from our farm home. When Mark found these pictures his grandfather had taken, we were not aware that he had taken so many pictures of our children and of the trips we took, people who visited our home and activities around our children’s lives. We even found older pictures taken of his and my mother’s lives.

When we found this goldmine of pictures, most of which were taken by my husband and a few were taken by professional photographers, Mark was challenged by the number of pictures that his father left in unusual places and order. So he took advantage of modern technology to put these pictures, in no certain order, in a rotating, lighted display.

This display can show more pictures than most of the snapshots I put on the walls with scotch tape. As I live alone in my apartment looking at all these pictures and the display I find I am not as lonely because so many of the pictures were not posed.

Friends of all of our family who have seen the pictures have commented on how happy they are to have these pictures of some of the events that included their children. They were able to see a picture of the band teacher, their own grandparents or other loved ones they have not taken a picture of during his lifetime. For example, Mark has said he has received phone calls and letters of thanks for an unexpected gift of one of his relatives and our beloved late daughter-in-law appears at least twice in pictures Lester took at Mark’s graduation. We did not know Jenny at that time or at that younger age and it makes those pictures more valuable.

We are grateful for pictures of our own grandchildren or great-grandchildren that we very seldom see and we hope that those grandchildren will be glad to see their aunts, uncles and grandparents at younger ages. So I guess any moral might be “share pictures of your family because they will appreciate your effort and the pictures themselves”.

Say cheese.