I Am The Memory Keeper

I was thinking about my current project - you know, the gigantic memoire album of our time living in Germany - and contemplating how I decide to create a page.  I have pictures of so many things - events, visits, celebrations and vacations and even just everyday random shots - and not all of them can make it into the album.  I’ve already gone through my folders and listed the subjects of proposed pages but when I get to that part of the list I’m not always inspired to work with those photos.

So, what do you do when this happens to you?  Do you just move on to another folder?  Pick a layout from your favorite gallery and “lift” it? Or trudge through and make the page even if you don’t “feel” it?

Since I’m putting together a chronological album and I like to see the immediate results of the expansion and organization, I’ve been doing the latter - trudging through - and it’s made it a little harder to keep going.  In fact, I find myself returning to some of those uninspired layouts and changing background papers, adding, subtracting or changing elements and even editing the journaling.  I’ve also found that some of those pages that I’d already completed (the ones that grabbed my attention and inspired me to create) have to be adjusted because I don’t want them to “clash” with their companion pages in the album.  I can’t stand the idea of having a “girly” page next to a “grunge” page and have gone to great lengths to coordinate pages that will lay side-by-side in my album.

Anyway, all this thinking got me to wondering why it matters to me at all.  I mean, growing up, we never had much in the way of photo albums.  There was my baby album - kept in a dresser drawer in my mother’s room and rarely taken out - and one other magnetic album with a few random shots per year scattered through the pages.  All the rest of our photos (not many, sadly) lay haphazardly stacked in a built-in cabinet in our living room alongside archived bank statements, check registers and utility bills. 

And yet, when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera, I started creating the first of my “scrapbooks.”  These were put together using cheap, magnetic albums that almost immediately began the work of yellowing my photos and degrading the ticket stubs and other bits of memorabilia but they still did the job of documenting my life as I saw it. Unfortunately, they were all lost during my college years - a large box of albums and keepsakes was left in the truck of a girl I didn’t know who gave me a ride home at the end of the summer (Wow! I remembered the bag of geodes but forgot to get the box filled with precious memories. DOH!)

Gone are the school photos of friends from grade school and blurry shots of my pals goofing off for the camera.  Gone also are the notes I wrote, the addresses I kept, the notes from my friends.

So, knowing how fragile those keepsakes and memories were, I want to make sure my kids don’t end up with the same legacy.  If that means “trudging” through layouts that I don’t feel like making, then that’s what I’ll do because it’s my job as a mom.  I’m the keeper of the memories - the Memory Keeper.

And just to show that I’ve still been plugging away, despite the ennui…

  

Tschüss!

Credits:  Gina Miller, Michelle Coleman, Meredith Fenwick, Vickie Stegall, Kelly Mize, GinaMaria, Vicki Parker, MissTiina, SDesigns, Digitreats, Natali, Katie Pertiet, Lalalime, Terri Martin, Sue Cummings, MissVivi, Misty Cato and inspiration from Anna Aspnes.

P.S.  Don’t forget to check out Donnie Hoyle in “You Suck at Photoshop”  Episodes #16 and #17 are up now.  (Yeah, I’ve been slacking in my reminder duties…)

Filed under I Scrapped!, Plugs & Reviews, Stuff and Rants |