The Written Word

Have you ever put a scrapbooking page together in your head before the event ever happened? I don't necessarily mean what paper or stickers you're going to use, I mean you go to an event, i.e. a birthday party, and say to yourself "I need a picture of the birthday boy opening a present, blowing out the candles and hitting the pinata... and I'll keep the homemade invitation they sent me and include that on my page... perfect!"

After years of scrapbooking, I do that quite a bit. At first, my husband would be quite annoyed with me as I'd urgently beg... "Get the camera! Get the one of her opening the gift! Have her hold up the cupcakes she helped me frost!" Now, he's properly trained and at an event where he's in charge of the camera, he knows what I want.

But I realized recently that what I'm really doing is working on the story. My husband and I were in Montana with friends last week and sometimes it's hard to remember to take pictures when the kids aren't around. But there were certain stories I wanted to tell, parts of the trip I knew I'd want to remember. I reminded the guys to take pictures before they went out fishing. My friend and I took a picture of eachother on our mountain biking excursion. We took a picture of my husband and I on the back porch.

But by themselves, what story does that tell? In a lot of ways, I'm writing the story in my head, which is why I take the pictures that I do. I need to have a picture of the guys fishing because I want to say that's WHY we chose Montana as a destination. These two guys fish every year in Montana and this year, the wives went, too! I'm glad we have a picture of the mountain bike adventure because I want to tell the story of how the map they gave us was HORRIBLE and after biking for three hours we never found the trail we were looking for ("oh, didn't we tell you these aren't established trails yet and you just have to guess that tall grass is the trail?" "NO!") and we had to throw our bikes over 5 foot fences ("oh, didn't we tell you the combination to the locks for those gates?" "NO!") and we ended up climbing two mountains when we were looking for a low-elevation river ("oh, didn't we tell you to look for little yellow signs?" "NO!") and about the great massage we had after we got back. And the picture on the back porch will be a great visual when I write of the great view we had when we ate meals there and sat in the hot tub at night.

This is my page. The photos are important, because you can visualize my story by looking at the pictures. But they mean nothing if you don't tell the story with the written word. Although these stories are fresh in my mind now (and my buttocks are still sore from that mountain bike), I love that 30 years from now I can look at the pictures, read the story and remember that wonderful 4 days we had at this resort. Hopefully by then I'll think the mountain biking fiasco is funny.