Books on a Shelf

If you read this blog, you know that I am a scrapbooker.  I love to create art out of my memories, so that I can look back on days gone by and re-live them.  I get sentimental on quiet afternoons and flip through the pages, thinking about vacations and camping trips, birthdays and theatre visits.  I smile at the happy faces of family and, because I also scrapbook the hard moments, sometimes cringe at memories that have shaped who I am through fire, tenacity, and determination to make it through.

I keep my scrapbooks on a shelf, under a console table in my great room.  My childhood and high school memories are there.  There is a pink leather book that chronicles my wedding, and a brown one with family history bursting from the pages.  But two of the books that mean the most to me are not on that shelf any longer.

I sent them out into the world with two little boys that I love, but will likely never see again.  While Neil and Austin were in our home, I kept Project Life style scrapbooks for them, thinking of the days in the future when I would sit with them, maybe their wives and children one day, flipping through the pages and remembering the times we shared together in their childhood.

The books were much shorter than I thought they would be, one page for every week together seems awfully short when there are less than a hundred there.  There should have been more… but then as I have stated in other entries, I am not dealing in should haves any more.  They were what they were.

When it came time to send those books off to the group home where the boys are staying, I paused, stepped back, and went through them one last time, photographing every page.  It would have been better if I had used a scanner, I know – certainly there would have been less glare from the page protectors – but again, those should have thoughts that can bury you.

I made the photos of their albums into slideshows, so I still can flip through them when and if I feel that calling to do so, hopefully someday with only happy thoughts in my heart.