Jenn McKinlay: Recently (last year, the year before, I have no idea), I listened to The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson. It is exactly what it sounds like, a book about cleaning out your possessions before you die so that the people you leave behind don't have to.
My best friend is Swedish and we talked quite a bit about the book while I was listening to it. My friend confirmed that this is how most Swedes are - thoughtful about not leaving behind problems for others. I can vouch that this is true because she and I are the same height and weight and every time we visit, she gives me shoes or clothes because she's also 12 years older than me and in constant death clean mode. I'm okay with this because she has excellent taste and takes care of her things so it's a win win.
What I loved about Magnusson's book was that she made the death cleaning easy and straightforward and then you get to the final chapters and she talks about the one thing that makes even death cleaners stumble -- photographs.
Well, I was determined not to falter. Armed with a trash bag, a shredder, and the misplaced confidence of someone who has watched exactly one episode of a home organization show, I opened our storage unit.
You know the one. The Indiana Jones warehouse of my past where between the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail were seventeen boxes labeled “PHOTOS—IMPORTANT!!!” (Apparently, I felt very strongly about that in 2009.)
Here’s the thing about old photos. You don’t simply “go through” them. You time travel. One minute you’re tossing duplicates, the next you’re misty over a blurry snapshot of a long-gone dog who, in that photo, is mid-zoomie and eternal.
I found hairstyles that should have come with warning labels. Seriously, I think my bangs in the 80's are solely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Outfits that were clearly chosen during a period of temporary insanity, I mean, were shoulder pads that doubled as pillows really necessary? Entire vacations documented before smartphones, when I took 24 photos and 19 of them featured my thumb or a sunset that looked beige.
And yet.
There were the Hooligans dressed up as toilet paper mummies. The Hub's grandparents dancing at our wedding. Friends tailgating at the college game where the keg was featured but we're all there in our day-glo highlighter hued clothing, holding red Solo cups.
I’ll confess: the shredder remained tragically underfed.
Yes, I mailed a decade of photos to an ex so he could remember what he looked like in the 90's. Yes, I let go of the mysterious landscapes that simply didn't translate their awesomeness to a faded 4 X 6 inch print. Yes, I bravely discarded photos of people I absolutely couldn't identify. Who are you, sir, and more importantly why are we hugging?
Still, knowing that my Hooligans (bless their hearts) are never going to care about the 20,000 photos that document their Dad's and my lifetimes, a solid dent was made. Many giant boxes have been distilled into several much smaller ones with their contents to be digitized at a future date. The rest? Well, progress is best measured by hefty bags and I have many to go before I sleep (nod to Robert Frost).
How about you, Reds and Readers, what do your photo archives look like?
It would take me the next twenty years [at least] to digitize all the photographs we have . . . I'd consider digitizing them except for the fact that there's something quite satisfying in holding a special photograph in your hands . . . .
ReplyDeletePhotos are so hard. Before we moved from Maine in 2011 I went through all my photo albums. It was a walk down memory lane, and I'm so grateful I took the time. All the old-style big book photo albums, mine, my parents', my grandparents', were in one box and never arrived in Florida. In this case, all I have are the memories. What's funny, the important ones I can still see in my mind's eye. Nowadays, my photos are on my hard drive and my physical and cloud backups. I still have some smaller photo albums that survived, but everything is online.
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