Old photos

We have had two days when it was smart to stay inside.  Thursday was a mixed precipitation day with snow, sleet, and freezing rain.  Yesterday we had that in the morning but heavy snow in the afternoon.  I'm not sure how much we got, but it was heavy enough to put several statewide TV stations off the air.   This morning the pine trees' boughs are saggy, and it's in the single digits outside.  The sun looks like it's going to come out, but I suspect the roads will stay icily packed, so I won't be going to quilt guild this afternoon.

For 10 years, I have been saying that "the next snow day, I'm going to go through that box of old photos," and that's what I finally made myself do yesterday.  In a very heavy box, I found albums and tons of envelopes of prints from the drugstore I had never organized.  Did I need them all?   Remember when we used to get two copies of prints so we could share them?  Many of those envelopes contained both prints.

I whittled most of the box down to half a shoebox-sized decorative box and arranged the photos more or less chronologically.  I suspect I won't add too many more from the two binder/albums I haven't gone through yet.  Since Chris was born on a Friday, I used to take his picture every Friday for at least a year.  And then there were the cute shots in between.  I sent many to my Mom who, several years ago, made albums for both me and Chris with them.

There were some treasures, though, like this picture of me and Paul from 1993 in front of his old library at Norwich Univ.  This was years before we got together, and I was touring some foreign librarians around the state.  Paul showed us the old library and also the new one under construction.  The librarian from Pakistan sent me the photo, and they were all very nice.  I think the woman was from the Philippines and the man on the far left from Indonesia, but I can't remember where the others were from.  I told the Indonesian that I had read all the books by Pramoedja Ananta Toer, and he was shocked, saying "he's a Communist... banned."  I explained that in this country, we can read whatever we want, and that's what public libraries are all about.

I kept that photo on my desk for years, even when I moved desks and offices, so I must have imprinted Paul's image in my brain - and heart.  We enjoyed looking at it yesterday.  He asked how I got so tall, and I said it was my heels and hair with its perm.

There were more such nice memories yesterday, but today I'm giving myself license to quilt!  :-)