Make time for your scrapbooks

By:Carie F.

As we packed up the house my grandparents lived in for 35 years, the task of doing something with their 10 boxes of photo albums fell to me. I started to go through them the other day and came across the shoebox filled with old pictures that I remember seeing when I was growing up.

Pictures of my gramma when she was young, of gramps and his 13 brothers and sisters, of my mom and her sister growing up. I had always said when I started scrapbooking that I would sit down with my gramma and go through these pictures, to find out who was who, what they were doing, what were the memories behind the pictures. But I always put it off. It’s too far to drive for a weekend. I can’t take the time off school, I have essays and exams to write. I want to spend time with my friends. I work shiftwork and I'm too tired. I travel for work now, I want to stay home on the weekends.

Now it’s too late. While I was busy not making time for my family, something started happening to my gramma. She got confused, and forgot things. Her personality changed. Then she had a major stroke. The MRI came back and the doctors told us she had a brain tumor. The operation to remove it was a success, and she started to recover really well. Six weeks later, on the day she was supposed to come home, she had another stroke. She can’t tell me what the memories are behind the pictures anymore, and I’ve missed my chance.

I now make time to scrapbook every week, and why scrapbooking has become even more important to me. I want to make sure my family will always know what made me laugh, what made me smile, what I wanted to remember when I took that picture. I’ll scrapbook the 77 years of pictures that I’ve been given the best that I can, but I’ll always regret not finding the time to sit down to hear the history.

Tomorrow at dMarie Daily: What I Like More about DMarie...., by Denise McClung