How to Store Your Photos or The Incredible Lightness of Being Divorced

Our holiday dinner table one of the last years of marriage.
Things weren't nearly as perfect as they look here--but it's a very pretty photo.

I was thrown out of my life in 2007. He wanted the house, he said, so he could raise his new family there. So I left, blubbering something about how I was taking the photo albums. The picture below doesn't quite do the situation justice. I think I moved 41 albums to my new place. And when I moved again a couple of years later, I packed up those albums again.

When the second round of devatating fires here in Southern California coincided with the realization that I can no longer afford my current house due to a reduction in my alimony, I knew it was time to crack open the covers on the record of my seemingly perfect life. We don't take pictures of the terrible times, do we?-- the creeping doubt and desperation--and I suppose if we did, I'd have happily left those photo albums behind. Though I wasn't evacuated during the fires, I could see the flames from my windows. If I'd had to leave, would I have had time to pack up a hundred pounds of albums? Probably not.

the old albums (the salvageable ones) now empty

the new photo boxes with an album on top for size comparison

Marie Kondo says she prefers to store her photos in albums, but I'll bet she doesn't have 40 of them. Or 20. Or even 10. Why do we Americans have so much of everything? I think photo albums are cumbersome for sharing in a group. Everyone has to huddle around, crane their necks, and hope the photos don't slip out of the pages if you're passing the album from person to person. These books weigh a ton when filled with photos so you need two hands and have to put down your drink. It seems easier to me to just grab a stack of pictures and pass them.

These boxes hold over a thousand photos each and have index cards where you can write the year, the subject, the place, and even make special notes or comments. The company doesn't provide nearly enough cards, but I just made copies on card stock. I made two boxes for myself, incorporating my mom's old photos as well. And I made two boxes for each of my daughters, which I will hand deliver to them when I move to Minnesota in a few months. Meanwhile if a wall of flames races from the hills to the ocean, I can get these into the Prius in two trips.

Aren't you wondering what I did with the photos of The Someone and of us a couple? I put the nicest specimens in the daughters' boxes. And all the photos of his lovely family were put into a Christmas box and mailed to his office last month. His likeness does not make an appearance in my photo boxes, but he did take a lot of the pictures. I'm grateful for that. And I'm grateful for the experience of looking at the photos--of seeing those new babies, birthday parties, proms, graduations, family vacations, and friends with their heads thrown back in laughter. I think when we take pictures, or put them in a book or a box, we are recording love.

Saturday Beach Report

It was 2018 when I last walked on the beach. The Christmas tree was still up, and I had a houseful of guests. Since then the guests have all gone home, the beach has been pounded with high surf as five different storms tried to drown the memory of fires and drought,  and I've finally recovered from  pneumonia.

Being on the sand today, I felt like a visitor to a strange land. The dredger is in the harbor making noise, and the beach is a tangle of blackened debris--detritus from the the Malibu fire, I guess, and huge pieces of things lay marooned here and there as if flung ashore by the angry hand of some irritable god.

This, I've heard, is a piece of the Ventura pier, washed ashore while I was still coughing and spending the day in my pajamas.

It's encrusted with its history, like all of us, whether we remain in place or are uprooted by force.

The world is brimming with turmoil these days. I feel lucky to be part of it.

"...can cause confusion in the elderly"

my sick room

This is not a throwback post wherein I'm going to reminisce about my mom. I'm writing about me. 

I have pneumonia, and when I went to Urgent Care on Wednesday morning, I was pretty much out of it. I'm told I was there for three hours. I remember seeing the doctor, and explaining to the X-ray technician about the metal clips in my spine. I remember  getting my arm bandaged after the blood draw, but not the poke of the needle. I slept most of the while I was there, unable to sit up or stay awake. There was, I'm told, a very charming man in a neck brace in the waiting room, explaining to someone in Argentina with his phone on speaker that he couldn't make the trip. I didn't hear a word. 

That was Wednesday. I'm much better now, though still too sick to leave the house. My housemates are tending to everything. I'm thrilled to have insurance (Medicare)--though I don't have a supplemental policy like my mom's that covered every penny, I feel very lucky. I can't imagine how awful it would have been in the wee hours of Wednesday morning when my teeth were chattering like a cartoon skeleton's to weigh the question of whether or not I could afford to go to the doctor. What is causing the confusion in the minds of people like Paul Ryan who entertained cutting Medicare? What  caused the confusion in the minds of the Republican lawmakers who tried over and over again to repeal the Affordable Care Act? Maybe they need antibiotics.