17 September 2010

Preserve Your Memories

Post title nod to Simon and Garfunkel



My camera is broken. That beautiful photo above? Public domain, not mine. I've watched many priceless moments come and go this week, moments I definitely would have captured for posterity or my FB status updates. Sadly, those moments will now have to rely on my swiss-cheese brain to stay alive, which pretty much means most of them are doomed.

There is something kind of poignant about relying on memory alone, making a day that much more special because nothing remains to prove that it ever was. Hopefully, I will remember at least a few of the uncaptured yet captivating things we saw today: the wonderful old graveyard we visited...the ornately carved tombstones from the 1800's with entire life stories contained in birth dates and death dates...the lizards and the frog the kids caught (and released)...the grave rubbings we made of flowers, crosses, and birds...my friend Miriam giving Lady E a piggy-back ride, their faces bright with the setting sun as they looked out over the oak covered hills. Oh, and my four year old asleep on a raised grave. That was a sight. My little sweetie, curled up like...well...an angel, snoring away on top of some long gone Italian person's lichen-covered final resting place. It was a shade creepy.

I'm pretty sure that last image will stay with me for a very long time. The others I will try to hold on to, but I fear they will flit away. Thank God for photographs and the worlds they preserve for us. Thank God for blogs, so we can write about those worlds when our cameras are broken.

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