Pictures

I’m populating a shared photo album so we can run a slide show during the celebration of life for my folks in September. I plumbed my Apple pictures, and moved onto other folders on my computer, starting with backups of my parent’s computers.

Starting with dad’s, I ran into a couple of dozen photos of what look like pages of old drawings from, probably, a book. I kept going. After cruising the .tifs and .jpegs, I returned to the pictures of pictures and deleted them. These were very likely from a project dad was doing for someone. Perhaps the original pictures were damaged and he’d cleaned them up in photoshop. I don’t get to know! And if the book is on my shelf, I’ll find it someday. Forensic photo sorting is an ongoing theme post my parent’s deaths.

Next was to revisit my own photo folders, of which there are many, starting with the first of my digital cameras, moving to early cell phone camera shots, taken before Apple smoothed everything out. What stopped me in my tracks was pictures I’d taken, in both of mom’s kitchens, of expired food, fresh & canned, redundant containers of breadcrumbs (seven, and all home made!), jars of unrecognizable and surely toxic sludge residing in each fridge etc… Also, the mounds of garbage and recycling I found on the Island when she went on her last solo trip. Seeing this again, 10-years later, brought back a flood of distasteful recollections, but not the abject fear I experienced discovering all these irrefutable pieces of dementia evidence the first time around.

Now I am pondering when to delete these photos. Not yet.