“I didn’t know you had these pictures, Mom!”
Matt’s face beamed. He grinned his biggest grin, spellbound by the photos he held in his hands.
Hushed, he studied one snapshot after another.
“These will be great, Mom, to show my girls the people and places I’ve been telling them about all these years.”
Matt was talking about pictures I took in South America when he was age six through nine and our family lived in a remote mission center at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere.
Because of Matt’s delight in discovering those old pictures, I scanned old slides by the hundreds, getting prints, scrapbooking them, and placing them in three-ring binders among written stories from those years. (And eventually, I wrote a memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir.)
What are the takeaways for you?
Point #1: Include photos with your memoirs. Your children and grandchildren will be at least as delighted as my Matt was to see our old photos.
Point #2: Photos can help you discover, and then add, detail and richness and depth and breadth to your memoir—and those are important ingredients for (a) capturing readers’ interests and (b) helping them live your stories with you.
Readers can get inside your stories when you recreate them through the five senses—sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Photos can help you do that. (Remember Peter Jacobi’s words, “No story has a divine right to be read.”)
For example, here are two photos of the little commissary at our mission center in South America. That's me in the red shirt. (Oh, my, I was much younger then. And slenderer. Sigh . . . .)
When I stumbled upon those pictures many years later, I remembered the commissary’s smells: ripe, tropical fruit. Powdered laundry detergent. Broccoli. And rancid bread—if the bread man had come.
And then I remembered the burlap bags. Since we had no paper bags, one of our options was to lug groceries home in colorful locally-made burlap totes. They were coarse and scratchy and had a dried-grass-burlap-ish smell.
And then I remembered the flour I bought at the commissary, hand-scooped (by someone, somewhere—I probably didn’t want to know the specifics) into tiny little plastic bags, usually a bit grimy.
And then I remembered the weevils that lived in that flour.
And then I remembered that at first, I didn’t know what to do about the weevils. I must have led a very sheltered life because I didn’t even know what weevils were, let alone that they could live in flour.
When I first arrived at the mission center, no one taught me that I could (a) put the flour in the freezer and freeze those little critters to death, or (b) spread the flour on a cookie sheet and bake them to death. Then all I had to do was sift out their lifeless little bodies.
And then I remembered that before I knew how to murder weevils, I fed them to a big crowd. I was asked to bring cinnamon roles to an event and, you guessed it—they were speckled inside with little black, crunchy dots—dead weevils. (You can read more in my memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir.)
See what I mean about the value of photos? I knew those stories—but I had forgotten them. I needed to rediscover them. Taking another look at those photos did that for me. And then I could include them and their stories in my memoir.
Sharon Lippincott, too, knows the value and joy of old photos. Reading her "Photographic Memory Jolts" was pure enjoyment for me. From only one photo, she listed dozens of memories.
Take, for example, Sharon’s memories of saddle oxfords. Her post reminded me that every morning before school, I spent a lot of time polishing my own saddle shoes—the white part and the black part.
And I’d forgotten all about my Ivy League saddle shoes with the oh-so-cool little buckle in the back.
And then there was Sharon’s memory of Natalie Wood using Scotch Tape to keep her bangs in place while they dried. Yes, I did that too.
Sharon’s post is a fun read, a treasure trove of history especially if you’re around my age—and all from just one photo!
How about you? Pull out an old photo related to one of the stories in your memoir.
- What emotions does it stir up?
- What songs were popular at that time?
- What styles of clothing, eyeglasses, hairstyles, shoes, furniture, and architecture does the photo capture?
- Does the photo raise questions?
- What happened just before the photo was taken? Just afterward?
- Was something significant brewing at the time, even if you didn’t know it until later?
- In later years, what happened to the people in the photo?
- Does it remind you of additional stories?
Go beyond looking at your old photos. What smells come to mind? Textures? Sounds? Tastes? Sights?
Listen. Smell. Feel. Taste.
Relive.
Unravel.
I have a hunch you’ll discover details
that will add gusto to your stories.
Have fun!
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