The Ramblings of the Nomadic Designer

1^st February 2012

From the Country Cottage

Technology

It’s a great thing, but sometimes we lose things that our kids will never know. The folks are getting a new bigger television, so they asked for help in altering their entertainment cabinet. Because the new unit will be wider, the portion that had a door and several shelves to the left of the television must go. We cleaned out the accumulated stuff and altered the cabinet; the new TV will come soon. What we were left with however was all the stuff that had been in the cabinet that is now gone.

The brickabrack was no problem, add it to the already mostly full china closet in the kitchen, BUT what to do with the boxes of other stuff. First 3 boxes, fifty some-odd years of greeting cards got sorted into 3 piles, Mom, Dad & cards to both- Mom would sort these. The challenge was the boxes of loose pictures!

With most of us having a digital camera, when was the last time most of us developed a roll of film, and walked away with an envelope of pictures?? Between my 2 sisters and I ,we have 6 children, and I have the only grandson. These boxes contained not only the pictures that Mom & Dad had taken & never got into an album (there are about 40 of those in another storage area), but I realized as I was sorting the pictures ,that there were also all of the pictures that had been given to my grandmothers over the years.

Loose pics, about 11 tri-fold wallet inserts, odd envelopes, the pictures kept emerging…. I saw my children as babies and toddlers, my nieces and nephew, cousins I had not even thought of in years. I even found a tiny copy of my own wedding picture. Goodness sakes- I had hair then!

Then came the ones I only dimly remembered or had never seen. Myself as a child , my sisters as babies, my grandmother Ada as a young women and as a toddler. There was even a picture of my maternal great grandparents! I was shocked to see that my mother’s brother strongly resembled his grandfather and that Ada was her mother’s image- no wonder she was momma’s pet!

What I am getting to is that with our advances in technology- what will we leave behind for our children to discover?? A tiny box of memory chips??? Files on a computer??? I loved looking thru all those old pictures, remembering the faces looking back at me, wishing in the case of my grandmother to hear her voice again so badly. Here are some of the pics that I brought home.