Getting near end of process of making photo albums

I made a mistake it's only since June that I've been making photo albums. I got more prints back from Pixel Perfect the print shop. Then I told them to go ahead and print out some more. When I've finished there will be thousands of photos to house. Luckily I bought the albums back in 2019 – it's been that long since I have been planning this project – and still have some left over. Two months is a long time. In that time my grandson has been born. In those two months I had my first art show and started planning my second. In those two months we had days and days of sunshine (a big contrast to the wet conditions of last year). 

I say “I made a mistake” but you probably need to know what I’m referring to. It’s not obvious on the face of it but at some point in the past week or 10 days I wrote something on social media about having been making photo albums since May.

This is how my mind works, and it could very well be the same for other people. I make a seemingly casual statement either in writing or verbally and it becomes cemented in my mind as a concrete fact. At the time I made the statement I sincerely thought that I’d been making photo albums since May but when I looked at my blog back-end today I find a post from 11 June about photo albums. 

Then again, on rethinking it that doesn’t mean that I started the albums on 11 June, in fact if I read the post it says that I was doing this activity for “a few weeks” which would take the start date back to May, so in actual fact my first statement was wrong and I had indeed been making albums since May.

Sigh.

It really is THIS difficult. It’s absolutely exhausting. Part of the process was making mum’s album, this is a “book” I made using materials my mother furnished. The story about this exercise is that in 2008 or 09 I asked mum to make notes about some photos I selected and photocopied and sent to her. It took her many years to complete the project, and then the yellow and blue sheets of lined paper were just stuck in with my photographic records being ignored. Then when I attacked the drawers in May and got out the boxes from downstairs containing other records left over from mum and dad’s apartment I assembled the materials, transcribing mum’s handwritten notes (sometimes hard to decipher), and making a little A4 “book” to share with people.

As I say it’s exhausting, but what propels me is knowing that if I don’t do this when I die all or much of that information will be lost forever. When I die (as my mother died) there will be no one to point to a photo and say “That’s grandma with Reba in 1940” about a photo of two women in woollen coats, a black-and-white photo that would otherwise be meaningless. Even if you’re a family member and you have some connection thereby to the photo not knowing is a source of pain.

Exhausting but profound.

I want to spare the people who rely on me this pain. I want them to be able to see clearly who is who, and add contextual information such as year and location, just as mum in her yellow and blue notes added context to otherwise random houses. I want to be a ferryman for the dreams of my progeny and their children down through the ages, forever and forever.

Amen!