How Photos Reshape a Memory

I recently found a pack of photos I printed in 2020. Mostly phone pictures, all photos of my kids, all from March and April 2020. My kids were 27 and 5 months old in March 2020 when the world shut down, and we thought we’d be at home for two weeks. I went through a full list of activities with the kids in those first two weeks, and then we just kept staying home. I remember feeling like I was standing on the edge of the void, staring into uncertainty and “unprecedented times” (a phrase I could live a lifetime without hearing again).

I was packing the house when I found this batch of photos, and sat down on the floor to see if there were any I wanted to keep before I ruthlessly threw them away. (I was on day 35 of packing and really over it at that point). I started flipping through them and then started seeing photos of things I’d forgotten.

The way my daughter attacked a napkin and ripped it to shreds at every meal. How Boose (my son’s stuffed cow) used to be so.much.bigger next to him. Those mornings when she would wake up early (every morning) and I’d drag her into bed with us to get just a few more minutes of sweet, sweet sleep.

We spent a lot of time at the (closed) high school nearby in those first few weeks of the pandemic. My son had an obsession with school buses, and the wide open spaces gave us lots of room to just breathe without seeing anyone else. I took a picture of us reflected in the bus mirror one day.

Oh, and there’s the dress she wore to her first funeral (5 months old), when I was a little bit uneasy because whispers of a pandemic were floating around, but nothing was near us, supposedly. That was March 7.

This is why we take the photos. They trigger the long-buried beautiful memories of a time period we might not be clamoring to remember. I don’t necessarily want to remember early-mid 2020. It was full of lots of scary feelings and very few breaks from childcaring (whose turn is it to go to the grocery store alone?). But these photos, and so many like them, soften those hard edges for my memory. They colorize the black and white, blending the quiet, the simple, the sweet little moments in with the days I remember being filled with bad news. It wasn’t all scary numbers on a doomsy website (though I did spend an unhealthy amount of time refreshing that page). It wasn’t all overwhelm and chest tightness and panic. Part of it was actually beautiful.

If not for these photos, I’d be tempted to forget a whole section of my life, partly on purpose and partly out of survival instinct. But I prefer the softer, gentler way of remembering 2020. Days filled with forts, snacks, diapers and naps. Not at all how I pictured that part of the year going. But beautiful in its own way, and worth remembering for sure. I thank my past self for taking the photos.