The Picture Purging Project

 My niece drove up from the boondocks to spend the day with me. We hadn’t seen each other since several months before the pandemic started. Her mission was to get me started on downsizing all the photos that I’ve accumulated over my lifetime and part of my parent’s lives. My goal was to end up with forty-one images to go into a 27” by 40” photo collage frame and another 100 to be digitized to become a slideshow in a digital photo frame.

My idea was that the photo collage will be an easy move if/when I ever have to get relocated out of my independent living unit on the continuum care campus to their memory care building. Those kinds of place always ask family to bring photos in. When my husband went into stroke rehab I scrambling to put together a board of photos that the therapists wanted in his room so they could try to pull language out of him. I don’t want to put that kind of stress on my nieces someday, not to mention they wouldn’t necessarily pick the same photos I would to invoke memories. Some of Don’s nieces and nephews, for example, brought in photos of their grandkids who Don hadn't seen often enough to be able to name before his stroke. Can we all spell ‘confusing’ for a guy who’d just had a massive brain bleed and 'awkward' for me having to remove them off the wall?

Anyway, photo purging with my niece was both easier and harder than purging my closet was last week. Easier because anything I was willing to let go of my niece wanted. Absolutely nothing got trashed that day. But it was harder because we kept getting side-tracked down Memory Lane and I kept forgetting what the goal was. We didn’t get anywhere near my finish line---I had a full week penciled in to complete the job---but we had fun and she went home with two 22” x 16” x 6” boxes full of photos and albums from my side of the family. She sent me a text when she got home saying she hoped I wasn’t too stressed with the purge and I wrote back, “Not at all. Downsizing to Goodwill is stressful. Downsizing to family is not because I know if I made a mistake I can turn into an Indian giver and get stuff back."

She also went home with the 25^th anniversary dress of my mom’s, a “memory jacket” of my dad’s golfing days and a like-new L.L. Bean goose down parka that she’ll give to her daughter. She also took my dad’s oak tool box, some old 1940’s linens and a couple of things to pass on to my other niece who is surprising both me and her sister by developing an interest in collectibles at the ripe old age of 50 something. She’s the niece I used to hire when I wanted someone to help me deep clean and I wanted to be talked into parting with stuff. She was ruthless with her, “Aunt Jean, you don’t need that!” She’s still a cleaning machine and does it professionally, doing two and three houses a day.

The second day of my photo purging project I was on my own and I disassembled most of my photo albums and filled a 13 gallon, tall kitchen trash bag up with photos to throw out. I also labeled four  4” x 7” x 11” photo boxes to rough sorting photos I might want to keep. Yes, I know, my idea of only ending up with 140 pictures quickly got scrapped as an impossible mission unless I got a lobotomy to cut out my sentimental side.

The third day of my project I filled up another 13 gallon trash bag. All but 5-6 pictures of our travel and trips got purged as well as all the photos from my husband’s side of the family, (except for a few ancestors that will get mailed to his brother). The travel photos I kept were from our time spent in Central City and Silverton, Colorado taken on the day I call the happiest day of my life. One of those photos will go in my jar of fool’s gold and rubies that we panned on that trip. It wasn’t a honeymoon but it sure felt like one. If we could have figured out how to make a living in Silverton we would have moved there. For months afterward we got home we tried to figure out a way to buy the Teller House Hotel that was for sale at the time. It was built in 1896 and only the bar on the first floor was still open, but we got to wander around upstairs and got an invitation to stay overnight at the bartender’s house. All I could think about was getting murdered in our sleep by a stranger who looked like Jack Nickelson so we slept in sleeping bags on bed the of our pickup truck instead---like that was somehow safer. A decade or so later casino money came in and turned the entire area into a huge tourist destination and the hotel got restored to its former glory.

Teller House

On the fourth day of my photo purging project I took all the photos I had in frames and in three photo collage boards out of their frames and started the process of figuring out what to put in my new photo collage board. It’s going to take time to complete that project because I’ll have to send many of the photos out to get resized. But it was unrealistic to think I could complete this project in a week. Duh! I’ve also rescheduled the photo frame slideshow part of the project to after I move. After researching the cost of sending them out to be digitized and putting them on a memory stick I decided it wasn't something I'm willing to pay when I can teach myself how to do it when I don’t have pressure of a moving breathing down my neck.

On the fifth & sixth days of my photo purging project I sorted through a 15” x 20” x 18” box of 35mm slides that I had taken back in the '60s. It was a box that I hauled out of my clothes closet during that purging and it had been in there so long I forgot what was in it. A month before my husband died we sorted through a similar size box of slides that he had taken, with the intentions of getting the best 100 put in a digital slideshow photo frame. We were both avid amateur photographers back in the day, me concentrating on candid shots of people, he loved landscapes and nature shots. The best of the best of his photos were tucked in the top of my box of slides and I made quick work of cutting that 100 slides down to 25. My slides---close to 1,000 I'm guessing---were a harder sort, but I did it! And I fully plan to carry that digital frame goal over the finish line and it will have to accommodate 200 images now, instead of half that. In addition to the 100 slides I kept for myself I set another 200 aside to give to my nieces since they were my favorite subject to follow around with my camera.

On the seventh day I rested to write this blog and wished a good fairy would come by to clean up the mess this week's project created. My work tables in the garage are filled with stuff to pack for Goodwill and photos that need resizing are waiting on my dining room table to get labeled to take into the photo center. Photos have a way of evoking memories that otherwise get lost in the shuffle of life and, boy, this week of photo purging sure gave me have some vivid dreams each night, making my Christmas week pass no anxiety. I had a full life, not a conventional life but it hit enough benchmarks to make me happy and with few regrets. ©

This is photo collage frame that will hang in my future laundry room.

This is what is left of my photos and slides and they all fit in my media cabinet. Before the purge I had albums that took up three feet on a bookcase, those white boxes were all full---two are empty now---I also had the four photo collage boards (up above) that hung in my garage, the box of slides and a basket full of photos that were in frames. The only photo collage I couldn't bring myself to disassemble is one of all the dogs I've had in my life. I'm thinking I can find a place to hang that one after I move. Don't judge. I never had kids.