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They traveled with me more than two decades ago and found their refuge here.
A safe haven, a quiet place far from the prying eyes of acquaintances or strangers, even my own.
Recently, in my quest to simplify things, I visited them.
I opened the most hidden cabinet in my library and let myself be carried away by that dizzying tunnel of time.
Thick, heavy, and colorful: my old photo albums.
I say they’re ancient because in this age when everything is digital, visiting my photographs from the eighties, nineties, and part of the 2000s is almost as obsolete as a daguerreotype (Louis Daguerre, 1839, creator of commercial photography).
There I was, sitting on the floor, surrounded by those massive stacks of books, with marginal notes, postcards, museum tickets, and so on.
As I flipped through the pages of my cherished memories—my parents’ house, family Christmases, trips with my young children, exotic places I visited with my husband, like the Bazaruto Archipelago in Mozambique, I felt that the images weren’t just two-dimensional rectangles of paper.
The memories broke free from their decades-long shelter and burst forth in flavors, smells, familiar voices, and the sounds of piano and guitar.
There was also a feeling of “What am I doing here?” which is what I used to ask myself when I found myself in those remote corners of the world.
I placed each photograph in its new, more compact and accessible home. Some will go to what they call “the cloud.”
This exercise in simplification took me several days, and I’m truly pleased, not only because bright corners of my memory have been brought to light, but also because, despite the way time plays its part in revisiting me, all I can do is give thanks.
I often forget things, but the good times always return.
Whether on paper or digital, in the album or in the “cloud”, I concluded the following:
The refuge of memory remains in the heart.
