Going through old pictures is a weakness of mine. When I was growing up, my grandparents kept theirs in the top drawer of a dresser in the spare bedroom. Both of my grandmothers did this, so I would rummage through those pictures, studying my parents and grandparents at younger ages. My mother wasn’t such a picture person, but I took it upon myself to keep track of our photos. When my grandparents and parents died, I ended up with a lot of the pictures. I get immersed in them sometimes and go on scanning binges so I can share them with relatives and friends. It’s an obsession, an addiction. Probably not a bad one, but I have to pull myself out of it into real life.

A reunion brings it all back again. I don’t have too many pictures from high school & college. Enough, but not to compare with the thousands I have today in our digital age. After our 50th reunion, friends began rummaging through attics, scrapbooks, drawers and coming up with some I’d never seen. The pictures flood you with images that you had forgotten in the everyday rush of our lives. You stop for a minute and go back in time, in wonder at the person, the child, you were back then when you thought you knew so much and had the whole world out there to conquer.

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Well, we all know more now. We’ve been out in that world and we’re glad to have survived. Our stories are varied, our lives tangled with children, grandchildren, spouses and parents, all in various throes of needing us. We know that we still haven’t seen it all, because what is life but one surprise after another, but we’re still living it and learning from it.

But, oh my. That girl child I was…I hope there’s still a lot of her left in me.

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I went to dinner with one of my grandsons this week. He just got his driver’s license and he drove…another day, another blog. Great kid, about 6’3″ and growing, and loved hearing my stories about the reunion while he told me about his recent mission trip at church and his basketball and soccer and his new job. He’ll have his own photos of high school to look through on the computer probably, until the next new invention. He said he couldn’t wait for his reunion. Isn’t that interesting? I never even thought about a reunion back then.

We’re all out there making more memories all the time. And going back through the photos of our lives…