Twenty years ago, I started pinning up snapshots on a big cork board in the hallway to create, in effect, a family quilt -- tacky, maybe, but colorful, pieced together with scraps of memories from the pictures of our lives.
I didn't think of it as a quilt at first. In those days, when I had three babies in five years, I didn't have much time to think. I was into survival. Slapping photos on a board seemed a whole lot easier than putting them in a scrapbook.Besides, I liked having those faces in full view, all happy looking and grinning at me as I raced by juggling a baby on one hip and a load of laundry on the other.
I never dreamed how that quilt would change, never imagined how it would look today. It evolved slowly, year after year, season to season, growing and changing just as we did, adding new faces, new friends, new adventures like salt to a simmering stew.
December always brought a big crop of Christmas cards with new likenesses of loved ones that were occasionally less flattering than the last. I kept some pictures around for ages, hoping in vain for a better shot next year.
With time, the board grew into an odd little gallery depicting the kids at various stages, playpen to prom, plus school pictures, team photos and endless shots of "blowing out the birthday candles."
I wasn't solely responsible for the selection. My husband often posted pictures of his students. And our kids were always adding or subtracting pictures of their flames.
Every year we'd tack up another grubby-looking shot of our family vacation taken at the same spot, the very same campground in Yosemite by some other camper whose noticeably less grubby-looking family would then swap places to have us snap a shot of them.
As the board filled, each new picture posed a challenge: Where to put it? How to make it fit just so, without taking too much away from another?
It's always a trick, isn't it, finding room for the new without robbing the old? Somehow no matter how full the board, we could always squeeze in one more picture.
In the last year of my husband's life and in the year since he died, I seldom glanced at that board. Didn't think much about it, really.
"Where are the pictures we made at Christmas?" said my daughter when she came home from college last weekend. "And what did you do with all the Christmas cards?"
An hour later, she called for me to come see the board. And there, with no words and only 50 or so pictures, she had spelled out the past 25 years of my life.
Such a funny mix: Snapshots of her and her brothers, some when they were little, others since they've been big, all of them my favorites; lots of friends, lots of relatives, young and old, babies and teenagers and middle-aged couples laughing over dinner, dancing at weddings, climbing mountains, stomping grapes, clowning for the camera.
She also included pictures of her dad looking very young and invincible; camping trips to Yosemite; a reunion for a church youth group; a snapshot of me with some of my closest friends whom she fondly calls "The Glee Club."
There were old family shots of the five of us, the way we were; and new ones of the four of us, the way we are now.
There were no empty spaces, no gaps or holes, a full board and a very rich life. I don't know how it will look 25 years from now. But I trust we'll find room for new pictures.