Home Movies

I was really trying to keep this thing updated, but then I went and got visitors...my sister and my niece (who is moving to Los Angeles...YAY! someone close!) and we are just having a wonderful time.

Anyway, tonight my sister and I watched old home movies of our family. I've had them here, in my fire-proof safe, for quite a while because I am planning on getting them put on DVD. But they are so out of order and mismarked, we needed to go through them. It's not unusual for the boxes to have more than one date or notation on them, so it gets very confusing. (Side-note: I've never minded the mismarked boxes. There was a certain charm and excitement to not knowing what you would actually see until you turned on the projector.) I don't think I've watched these movies for 20 years or so and my sister and I decided we must have watched the same ones over and over because we saw several we had never seen before.

This time, however, I was able to watch through a scrapbooker's eyes, or, if you will, an historian's eyes. While many of the movies were from "events" like Christmas and birthdays, I was also watching for the "details"...like when I caught my dad in the background nuzzling my cheek when I was a baby (I was such a daddy's girl), or the old slide in the yard, that my mom still has 50 years later, or even what the ceiling looked like on the old porch before we remodeled the house. There were many exclamations from us..."There's that sofa that is now in the basement." or "Why did Mother always have to fix my hair that way?" or "Gosh, Mom looked great even when running after 5 kids!"

We laughed at the interaction of all of us siblings and ooh and awed over ourselves as babies...me hollering to my boys, in the other room, to come watch me at my first birthday, or hunting Easter eggs, or playing with a kitten before I could walk. The vacations are there...my dad holding the hands of my brothers and sisters as he walked them into the waves of the ocean for the first time in their lives, and the time we visited relatives in Kansas...I didn't even know we had a movie of the aunt who raised my dad after he was orphaned. She died before I was 1 year old, so what a treasure to see her holding me.

Not all of these things are present in my current memory and not all of these things are immortalized in photographs. But they exist in these movies...thank goodness. And thank goodness for the technology to get this additional documentation of our history into a safe and lasting (for now) format. I can't wait to finish watching the rest of them tomorrow night!