Memory Links

I've been scanning negatives from one of the three-ring binders I brought to Mexico. I'm being disciplined and going through each binder from front to back and looking at each contact sheet and choosing those that I will scan. This past week has been a binder from May to October, 1996....Texas churches from various excursions, a trip to Puebla, and our first trip to England.



Wells Abbey, in Wells, England

Although the trip to England was primarily a visit to London to see a grandson.....and his parents too, we did take a few days to drive outside of the big city to some other towns. I remembered the whole trip with great fondness but it was remembered as a "package." When I start looking at the images, I started remembering the pieces of the "package" in detail.....where we parked the car on the roadside while we found the lady with a key to a church, the feeling in a church of worshipers from the past, the walk we took down a trail, the clouds that covered the sun as I waited for them to pass so I could photograph another church, the B&B where we stayed, the tiny bedroom and miniscule bathroom, the chinz on the breakfast table, the cozy evening out of the rain in a pub, a roundabout that seemed endless as we looked for a sign for our exit, the terror of learning to drive on the "English" side of the road. Each picture opened another slide show of the trip. You can see some of these images on my photography website.

How many times have you heard someone say that if there was a fire or some disaster, they would try to save their family pictures. They are so important to us because they provide links to what is stored somewhere there in our brains. And this isn't just to the images but it opens our memory to links of smells and sounds.

Who first said, "A pictures is worth a thousand words."