That Place

Pictures.  I have always loved them.  Long before social media, I was a collector of photographs–moments of people I love captured forever.  

For years, back when we used to print pictures, I would organize them in photo albums.  Each album was numbered and each picture placed perfectly in chronological order. My albums go well into the double digits–I treasure them. 

I have found myself returning to these albums more and more as time passes.  

These albums, collectors of memories.  

Images of extraordinary moments like baby showers, births, first days of school and graduations.  

Images of ordinary moments like swinging in the backyard, Saturday morning cuddles, Halloween costumes and playdates with friends. 

The printed date in the corner tells me these were taken long ago, and yet, when I close my eyes, the moments just happened. 

I close my eyes, and I am in that place again.

In all of my picture-collecting and album-making, I always put the extra pictures in a cabinet, stuffed in there like the memory itself–put away for me to bring out when I needed.  

The pictures were in no particular order, unlike my albums.  Combing through them was like finding a gift you did not know you needed.  

“Oh, I remember that!”
“Look at this precious baby picture!”

I find myself wanting things in order, and with the extra time on my hands, I decided to organize my cabinet. 

And so I began.  Smiling as I went through each individual picture, and remembering.  And thinking how quickly it all went.

I came to the stacks of my children’s school pictures.  

And I thought about the frames–the ones with thirteen openings for pictures kindergarten through twelfth grade. 

This type of frame had not appealed to me before.  I had always thought it was trite, unsophisticated.  

But, I sat there with all of these school pictures and nothing to do with them, and I realized I wanted to see the little school pictures that had been stuffed in the cabinet. I felt the need to pull them out permanently– to honor moments, the memories, the places. 

After finding and ordering the perfect frames, I excitedly placed each picture in chronological order.  

And it took my breath away.

There they were–my children–their story in photographs.  

Each snapshot took me back to that year.  That moment. That place.  

Teachers.  Friends. Class Parties.  A few trips to the office.  Report Cards. Conferences.  
Field Trips.  Football games.  School Plays. Pep Rallies.  Basketball games. Awards Days. Homecoming Dates.  Disappointments. Celebrations. Sleepovers. Heartbreaks.  Ceremonies. 

And, the white spaces between each picture, the in-between.  The summers filled with cannonballs, vacations, friends, snow-cones, trips to camp, and time with family.

They were all there.  All the memories–in each school picture, in each white space.

I have stared at these frames over and over.  And, I see our lives.

The author Celeste Ng wrote in Little Fires Everywhere:

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person; your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for existed at once.  You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin.  It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”

Ah, yes that place. 

Motherhood–home. 

I am thankful for these little school pictures and how they give me my children’s lives all at once.

And how they allow me to return to That Place, that Narnia, that refuge, again and again.