What Would You Save

When I was a kid my house really did burn down and although it didn't burn to the ground, we lost everything that didn't actually go up in flames, to smoke and water damage.

I have to admit, at the time it was devastating to my family and I'll never forget the image of my mom sitting on the curb, head down, hands covering her face while the firefighters reloaded their trucks and my dad tried to figure out where the six of us and our furry friends would all sleep for the evening.

As awful as that night was, we recovered. We moved on with our lives and we even eventually stopped having nightmares about it.

It wasn't until we were back to a normal living situation that we discovered there was one thing we'd lost that was truly irreplaceable.

The night of the fire, we were just thankful to get out alive, and uninjured, and as time passed we were able to replace all of our lost and damaged possessions.

Well... We were able to replace almost all of our possessions.

There was something lost that we could never replace... our family photographs.

Imagine losing your baby pictures, your parent's baby pictures, your wedding album, your high school yearbook, your son's graduation pictures, the photos from your vacation at Graceland, the images of your daughter's first step, first tooth, or first friend?

This happened to us back in the seventies, before there were PC's and digital photo keeping places like PhotoBucket.com.

Luckily we were able to scrounge up a few photos from family members we'd shared pictures with, so there's still a few embarrassing shots of me floating around, but the brunt of our images are long gone.

Photo of my 6th grade elementary school class appears courtesy of an old school chum and the magic that is Classmates.com.
I'm the dork wearing the white bib.