Snapshot of spring break 2028

The other day I was sifting through the massive amounts of stuff I have crammed into boxes in our crawlspace. Things that I have held onto over the years – Unused wedding gifts, books I will probably never read, creative writing stories and poems from college and tons and tons of photographs. That’s right, kids, PHOTOGRAPHS. Actual pictures in albums that you can pick up and turn the pages of. And because I went to school in the 90s – Wow, that makes me sound OLD! – before the dawn of digital pictures, all of my college snapshots are now shoved in a box in the back of my crawlspace.

And this is something interesting I’m gonna have to explain to Taylor about at some point. That when Momma was in school, she and her friends would take anywhere from 12-to-24-to-36 pictures at a time and then take the FILM from that camera into the drugstore at the mall and then have to wait at least one hour to see the photos. And then when you did get to see the images, only a handful were worth keeping, the others generally blurry, dark or just used for blackmail later on. And if there was an actual picture on that roll that you wanted other people to see, you had to take that film back to the mall, have copies made and then either hand deliver or mail them out. Do you know how ancient that is going to sound to Taylor? It already sounds like something cavemen did.

And part of me is totally fine with all of these memories stuck in box in my basement, because in the digital age EVERYONE manages to see your pictures. Which I’m cool with now, considering the majority of my photos are of my adorable daughter, but I would have been pretty embarrassed about if some of those images from my college days were splashed online. You know which pictures I’m talking about... The dreaded party-pics. The ones where you’ve had one too many margaritas and are dancing on top of the bar, or the ones where your shoving an order full of Pokey Sticks in your mouth at three in the morning. Yes, some of my finer moments that I’m thrilled were photographed with a cardboard, disposable camera and not something that could flash the image up on facebook within a second of it happening.

But as much as I cringe at these photos, they also make me laugh out loud. Especially the group shots. The ones of me and all of my friends du jour lined up in a dorm or apartment hallway, dressed to the nines with faces full of makeup, generally already buzzed with squinty-eyes and full opened-mouth smiles. Just think how much hotter those snapshots could have been if we had been able to look at the image right after it was taken, critique it and then hand it back to the photographer to take another shot where we suck in our guts, elongate our necks and smile with our eyes.

Oh, the pictures from the college days are just so embarrassingly fantastic and bring back a lot of fun memories. The parties, the friends, the absolute enjoyment of living in the moment. And I really would love to share some of them with you, but I don’t have a scanner to run them through to make digital. But they look something like this: