Sacred Moments

As winter moves in on my garden and the daylight hours creep away before I even make it home from work, I am forced to turn my attention away from this new passion of mine to an old and faithful friend.

Years and years ago, I fell in love with the art of scrapbooking. My best guess is that this passion was born from my desire to preserve the wonderful and fun times that I shared with my friends in the Order of DeMolay. Those days truly are precious to me, and I can trace my fanatical attempts to preserve my personal history through photographs to this period in my life.

Somehow, my passion for simply placing photos in a generic album along with captions blossomed into a desire to do something a little bit artful while preserving my memories. I began transferring my multitude of photos into scrapbooks - taking time to carefully arrange the photos and making sure to preserve every possible memory through my careful journaling.

Eventually, I progressed onto other scrapbook albums as well - there's the first vacation that my husband and I took together to Washington, DC and through the mountains of Tennessee, our trip to Pennsylvania to visit my family, Hubby's basic training graduation, our lives in Alabama, and most recently, our time spent together in Europe.

Admittedly, I've allowed this passion of mine to slip to the sidelines. I've neglected my scrapbooks for the past five years or so, and am now paying the price. You see, while I haven't been scrapping my photos, I've still been takingphotos. Lots and lots of photos. So many photos that I sometimes wonder if I'll ever be able to scrap them all!

But I will. I so very firmly believe in capturing my life through photos. These are the best mementos - precious memories stored on a sheet of paper. Pictures truly do tell a thousand words, and I want to convey every one of those words through my personal history books. I consider my memories to be sacred- something so special that I want to always be able to recall them and share them as I wish. And I can do that through these books.

This mission of mine has taken on a deeper meaning - I am documenting not only my life, but the life that my Hubby and I share together. This is a legacy that we can hope to pass down to our children, as I also plan to capture their little lives in scrapbooks of their own. Through these volumes, our memories and sacred moments can be passed down and shared through the generations. In this way, I can hope to achieve immortality for us.

I sit in my office, so proud of the thirty pages that I've managed to get scrapped since picking up my pen again this weekend. I've finally carved out a niche in my busy life, and a space in my office, so that I can pursue this passion again. Thirty pages covered six months. I've been forced to send my memory back five years and recall the stories behind these images that have sat neglected in shoeboxes over the years. I've had to dust off the boxes as well as my memory. I'm playing catch up - looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. Only just over three more years of our grand European adventure to preserve, then I can move on to the story of our lives since returning to our home country.

As I embark on this new journey in my personal life, I find myself setting new and grander goals for myself. I've accumulated a multitude of photos from my childhood that are in desperate need of preservation. I've got photos and photos and photos of my time with Rainbow. I can't hope to recall what each photo documents, but I can hope to get them into a cohesive collection for reminiscing. I want to preserve our most recent trips, our home, my garden, our passions in life. It is a long road ahead of me. But I plan to meet this challenge head on - after all, it is a mission that I am passionate about.