Memories Trapped Forever

Memories Trapped Forever
My husband was looking at pictures from our kids' childhood days and asked me to join him. We sat looking at the digital pictures and spent a few blissful Sunday afternoon hours reminiscing. It turned a boring afternoon and the evening into a pleasant one. That set me thinking about the magical world of pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. So true. Pictures are recollections of the bygone days and moments of life that have been so beautifully trapped for eternity, and these allow one to relive those days. It is a kind of time machine if I may say so.
My father was also fond of snapping pictures and made it a point to keep the SLR camera ready before marriages in the family. The roll would finish within minutes, and we had to wait for the pictures to be 'developed'. My cousins and I would gush over the pictures once the anxious wait period was over and we had the photos with us. We would be warned to be careful and not drop water or spill liquid over the photos lest we spoil them. We would look at those over and over again.
My husband had stored all the digital pictures in the laptop, and as picture after picture lit up the screen, we played the guessing game. We tried guessing the places we had been to ten to fifteen years ago. Our guesses about the more recent pictures were accurate, but we needed to exercise our brains longer when the picture displayed something (without including people) from the resort or the tourist spot we had been to. In some of the pictures, the younger kid, who was all of three or four years old then, would have sulked about not being allowed to take pictures, and particularly so when his older brother had been given a turn with the digital camera. We discussed with smiles on our faces how, on a few occasions, we would have allowed him to take pictures or buy an ice cream or a chocolate just to diffuse the situation. The pictures taken by him would be random and generally not include us, but somethings or fellow tourists, shoes, or even the ground under our feet! We had to beg and beseech him to be careful with the camera. We used to get a little irritated then, maybe, but when we think of those days now, it is with a lot of warmth. We reminisced about the bygone days and, in a truer sense, a bygone era – the pre-COVID era. Among other things, COVID had literally squeezed fun out of life. It had left us suspicious about the ability of our immune systems, about the people we came across, and even about the air we breathed in. We were unable to enjoy a simple street-side food with the same abandon as we used to before Covid showed up its ugly face
As the kids grew older, their studies took a priority place, and there were situations where we were home-bound as the elders in the family needed care. We would have to settle for local outings just to get a break from the mundane yet hectic schedules. We have a bunch of snaps from these occasions as well. Snaps taken during birthday parties, engagement functions, marriages, office gatherings, family gatherings, and a few here and there have taken up a lot of space in the laptop. We had always planned to arrange all the pictures in a chronological manner, but somehow have yet to get around to it. I think it is one of the things we will attend to post-retirement!
Then, there were pictures taken with the SLR camera before the advent of the digital era. We have a few albums filled with pictures, and I think we will get to them once we are done with the digital pictures. In a way, these albums are already well-arranged and do not need any work, and we can just sit back and enjoy. Some of my kids' childhood pictures are also in SLR. And then there are, of course, videos, and I think I have to reserve a separate blog for that.
Till then, Happy Clicking!