Pictures Take Me Back

I'm  a picture person.  Ask my children or my husband and they will tell you that at any given minute the odds are good you will find me taking pictures, editing pictures on my computer, putting pictures into frames or looking at the pictures in the many frames throughout my house.  Pictures take me back to the time when a child was still tiny, my husband and I were young, to our first home, to my childhood.  Pictures give me back my father and my grandparents.  They connect me with my past and bring the memories soaring back so that I can enjoy the movie clip in my mind over and over.  Digital photography has been such a blessing.  I have literally thousands of pictures of Dakota and they are all photoshopped to perfection, cropped to bring out the details.  How I wish I had digital cameras when my daughters were little!!  I can play my pictures in a frame, watch them come up one by one on my computer or even pop them up on my giant tv screen.  Thank you technology!  My babies have grown so quickly and life has moved so fast.  Gone are the days when two toddler girls rocked in their little chairs side by side in our living room chatting in squeaky little voices about whatever it is that little girls talk about.  Gone is our beloved Lacy, a mixed breed sweetheart of a dog who gave us unconditional love for fourteen years.  Gone is my daddy, a man who visited every single day, bringing the girls treats, taking them to the park, sitting and chatting with me.  But I get them all back with pictures.  I can focus on a shot of a moment on vacation years ago and remember the whole wonderful week, the people we went with, the sights that we saw.  Yes, pictures take me back in a most wonderful way, so if you see me with my camera and I seem to be just a little bit in the way, take pity on my soul....but remember, years later you may have forgotten this special moment, but I will have everything I need to play it over again and again in my mind!