I have spent the last few days going through about 225 pictures from when I was little.  Mom sent them to me, and they include pictures of our family which date back to 1967, when I was born.  I think there are probably more of our family childhood pictures out there, but this is a good start. I scanned them in, adjusted the color as needed (there was a definite need since there were many aging pictures from the 70s!), and I have now compiled them into a photo book.

Some of my favorite pictures are the vacation pictures.  We went camping somewhere every summer when I was a kid.  We often went to Colorado or New Mexico, and later we went to the National Seashore in Padre Island and to Florida.  One of the things I remember about Padre Island was looking for scallops in the bay.  I’d never known before that time that they had dozens of bright blue eyes.  Our friends, the Leggs, showed us how to scoot our toes along the sand and to feel for those scallop shells.  After we were done gathering them, we returned to our campground to cook them.  That was a memorable trip.  We walked along the beach, tried to avoid those purple man o’war jellyfish, helped the park rangers release baby sea turtles, and made new friends.

My dad is famous for finding things.  We can walk across the same parking lot, and he will come across $10.00 richer, while the rest of us will not have found anything.  When I was a kid, Papa would come home from work and empty his shoes.  He found change every day (we Potters have high arches which allow for the ability to store coins in our shoes).  He’d save all the change throughout the year and then use it to pay for the gas on our trips.

In the picture below, I think we were in New Mexico, where we met up with the friends whom we’d met the summer before on Padre Island.

We lived in northeastern Oklahoma, and I always loved the drive across western Oklahoma.  In later years, I used to love the drives David and I made from Dallas across west Texas to Colorado.  I have always loved the big open spaces and blue skies.  When I came across the picture below, I shared it, and my dad told me how much he also loved those drives across Oklahoma to New Mexico.

Then I came across this picture of us on Cottonwood Pass in Colorado.

I realized that we’d taken Davey across Cottonwood Pass just a few years ago, and we’d taken a very similar picture.  So now I had two pictures. First me with my dad, and then Davey with his. I love this “tie” through time.

I have come across other family pictures where I don’t really know the stories that go with them, and so I learned some new stories and perspectives from my brother, sister and parents.  I love stories.  It’s primarily why I write this blog. Now that we will all have a photo book of our family pictures, I would love for us to share and maybe write down more of our stories.  Maybe over the next year, we can begin to just jot down some of the memories we associate with the pictures, because we all have different memories and perspectives even about the same picture.

Maybe I can create a new book which includes our written stories.  That would be a very big treasure for me.