Nyel Steppin’ Out

After a loooong hiatus, I am back to my scrapbooking – a sort of sickness that has run in the family for generations. I stopped back in February. Then came deadlines for Ghost Stories…” and summer with its visitors and events and then autumn and Nyel’s surgery. I kept taking pictures but that was all. Sometime in early December (Nyel was still in his hospital bed) I spent evenings watching movies with him while I printed the photographs with my spiffy little Canon printer.
Then they sat in a big box, organized by date and interspersed with news clippings, programs, menus, and other keepsakes that would eventually go into the scrapbooks. All the while, I wondered why I feel compelled to spend all the hours on this more-or-less dead-end activity.

It’s not that Nyel and I sit down and ‘enjoy’ each book as it is completed. We haven’t done that for years. And it’s not as if I spend time ‘sharing’ them with friends. Gordon used to do that and I always noticed that all of us whipped through them, only stopping at the pages that included ourselves. I felt guilty about that, somehow, and don’t want to put us through that again.

Handy Reference Books

But, even though the why of it is unclear, here I am spending every spare moment cutting, selecting, arranging and gluing. And wondering why I don’t give it up. Then, yesterday, I arrived at September 9^th – the day of Nyel’s quadriceps tendon allograft surgery. As I ‘relived’ the next few weeks through the miracle of photographs and memory, I realized that I’d lost sight of what a Big Deal we’d been through.

Like all of life’s milestones, one day follows another and one important thing segues into the next. Now that Nyel is walking (albeit with a very complicated brace on his left leg) and even driving on occasion, the many steps it took to get him to this point have begun to fade away. Until we look at those photographs.

So, it occurs to me that, at least at this point in time, the scrapbooks serve as memory joggers. For a number of years they have been a handy reference archive. We go to them answer those annoying questions like ‘was that before or after our anniversary party?’ or ‘wasn’t it just last summer that we went to the lilac gardens in Woodland?’

On September 16, 2014

But now that we are of an age when the days slip by much too rapidly and seem to all run together, it’s nice to see that we have actually accomplished something. At the end of the day (or the week or the month) we can see progress – visual evidence that we are not just marking time.

Probably a lame excuse for this clearly serious scrapbooking  ailment. But it’s justification enough for me to keep on keeping on, one picture and one page at a time.