It's Genetic

My mother is building a new house; this involves packing up the old house and getting things ready to go to the new house. In my mother’s house is a buffet that has for as far back as I can remember contained two drawers so full of family photographs that we could hardly wrap our heads around them. Once in a while we’d open a drawer and wallow in the photos picking up a random one here of us three kids acting goofy with shorts on our heads while camping in Colorado and the next my brother at prom. With no rhyme or reason the photos randomly strewn about in the drawer await the day someone will sort them into neat little books marked Jenny, Andy and Joe. Well, the buffet is coming to my house and the photos preceded it. I committed to sorting and copying all the important photos for each family member. My Mother and I sat down last week and did a preliminary sort. We looked through photos for a whole day, tossing four garbage bags full of tax returns from the 80s, hair clippings from who knows who and photos taken of the driveway whilst starting the roll of film or blurry shoes or pictures of ourselves with one eye open. Then we made boxes of photos for my brothers. Joe gets all the ones of him and his friends skateboarding and miscellaneous blond girls and the skate ramp he built in Mom’s back yard that he must’ve photographed a hundred different ways. Andy gets the shots of summer camp and college and several group photos full of smiling faces only he’d recognize. My box contains photos with lots of big hair and enough eyeliner to outfit a whole season of Top Model. Also placed in each box are years of report cards. I pulled one out from preschool (I had to be four) and discovered why Ella may be having such a hard time learning to skip in ballet class.