Commonly referred to as "The Box Room," this small space spent our first few years here dark, dank and stuffed to the gills with all the junk we never got around to sorting. When the idea for a home business came to mind, it was mostly because of this room.
We had moved back into the house after living in the Bay Area for a year. It was the end of summer and I was six months pregnant with our second child. Before she arrived, I was determined to clear away the clutter of our past life, re-organize what we wanted to keep for the new one and maybe find some baby clothes I'd kept from our older child.
I love organizing. I'm definitely not as organized as I'd like to be, but I love the process of finding a home for something and tucking it in comfortably. My husband hauled the boxes out for me and my daughter helped me organize the piles of stuff: Keep, Toss, Donate, Sell. It felt great to actually get the 'keep' items to their homes right then-sometimes it took a few days. After many months of this, we finally got to the pile of stuff that didn't seem to have a home. The largest faction of which were assorted boxes of photographs.
As I sorted through duplicates and pictures of people I could no longer remember, I found quite a few photographs of my mother. Her 70th birthday was coming up and I began putting aside old black and whites, her wedding photo, shots of a girls' night out, a few funny photos from when we jumped on the back of a rhinoceros statue at a hotel. That was the moment I began thinking about print>pixel. What could I make with these pictures?
My family had a luncheon to celebrate my mother's birthday. I had brought my slide show, which I thought was long at 100 slides and roughly 15 minutes. I figured we could play it after the meal while people were still visiting, or as a background where people felt like they could leave if they needed to. To my happy surprise, most everyone stayed the second time through. And during the third, there were requests to pause at certain pictures so my mom could talk about where she was, what was going on in her life at that time or just to reminisce.
I was thrilled. My mother was overwhelmed. And everyone wanted a copy.
Those 15 minutes brought a lifetime of memories to everyone in the room. I felt proud to have facilitated that experience. My family is from Hawaii and many of my parents' childhood pictures were destroyed during World War II. When I first mentioned this venture to a friend, she said, "Do you really want to sit there feeding the pictures into a scanner, pulling the lid up and down?" But I don't think about the work in that way at all. For me, print>pixel is an opportunity to help someone organize their memories so they might be shared - maybe to even create new ones.
I didn't know the woman who was in most of the pictures I scanned. But by sharing the slide show, the woman I do know as my mother taught me a little of the woman she was before I was born. The daughter that I was pregnant with while I sorted through the box room may not know much of my mother at all. But it feels great to leave a cohesive picture behind, especially when I can point to a photo of my two daughters with me and my mom at that very luncheon.
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