Thursday, February 11, 2021 Don’t Crop That Photo!

This is a picture of an old photo of me and my little sister. It’s clear that we’re the subject of the photo – look at those smiling faces munching on saltines and peanut butter! The older I get, though, the more I appreciate all the other details. I remember those bowls and cups, but I sure don’t remember that wallpaper, and if you’d have asked me, I would have told you that we didn’t get a dishwasher until our youngest sister was born when I was about 11 years old.

As an aside, the reason for connecting my littlest sister with a dishwasher was this: we were sitting around in the kitchen one fall day and our parents told us we were going to be getting something new in the spring. It sounded really exciting and they let us guess what it could be. “A dishwasher?” “A color TV?” I’ll admit it was a bit of a letdown after that when we found out it was going to be a baby, but she turned out to be pretty special – way better than appliances. Somehow I connected that memory with us not having a dishwasher at the time, which we clearly did.

Anyway, when I started doing photo albums for our family, I learned how to crop photos and crop them I did. I cut off all sorts of unimportant background things – snip, snip, snip – into the wastebasket you shall go. I could fit more photos on the page that way, and after all, the people are usually the most important part of the photo, right?

But when I was looking through our old photo albums, I realized how precious to me those other details were. They presented a more full and rich history of those growing up years, reminders of the things that made up the tapestry of our lives. I won’t say I quit cropping photos altogether after that, but I made it a priority to save as much of the photo as I could. Our children will want to see those chairs in the background, the old toys they played with that are gone now, the cars we were driving at the time, the dishes we used…

When I look at the photo above, I love everything about it – the crumbs on the table, the Sue-Bee honey in the background, the cookbooks all higglety-pigglety on the shelf over the dishwasher, the nasty old chairs, our bibs (bibs, for Pete’s sake!) – everything. And I love the moment with my sister that was captured and those sweet, happy faces full of saltines.

Thursday thoughts with Lynniebee…

I’ll probably crop this in the morning…ha ha!