Are you any good at keeping secrets? Perhaps you’ve kept one since you were a child and never plan to tell anyone what it is. Or maybe you’re no good at keeping things to yourself and are itching to divulge it. Or, if you’re like me, you keep it and then find out that everyone knows anyway! Your prompt this week is
SECRETS
You don’t have to share any secrets here, so you can create for a character if you wish, or maybe you had a secret you kept that’s now out in the open.
I always enjoy seeing what you come up with if the prompt gives you inspiration, but there’s no obligation to share your writing. Here is the work you shared on the last prompt PHOTOGRAPHS.
I have photos in photo albums and stored in boxes but I also have a lot o photos hanging on my walls, as I feel photos should be displayed and not hidden away.
I have many photo boxes full of real hold-in-your-hand pictures of my kids as they grew. I need to make photo albums or scrapbooks someday.
Great prompt. I love photos. Mine are all unavailable right now in their final forms. My recent photos go back to 2009 and there aren’t too many of them. I have lots of throw away photos, but I love nature photos. Once in a while I capture a great picture of people, but they are not people I know, just ones I see out and about. One was a young heavy-set girl sitting on a blanket at the July 3rd Blast celebration in Woodlake. She had on a hat, and her hair perfectly framed her face, which was beautiful. She let me take several pictures of her and I love them. Sadly, I can’t find it easily on my blog or the pictures in my iPhotos file on my HP computer.
If I could do it all again I would still chose him, every time. But I would do things differently. I have photographs that remind me of when he was alive, but he is so still in the pictures and I can’t see his eyes sparkle or hear his laugh. I must have taken months of videos, if you played them end to end, but mostly of our children, not much of him. Oh, if I could do it all again, I would take hours of videos of him.
He was always working, even in his free time. He couldn’t sit still and would think up things to work on if there were no obvious projects that needed him. He was strong, so strong. He could pick up a 300 pound roll of carpet and drag it onto his back and carry it into a home or office. His biceps were as big around as the circumference of most men’s thighs. He had a big, broad chest that I could lay my head on, and that was my favorite part, just lying there beside him, feeling so protected and loved, feeling his chest rise and fall.
But I wish I had videos of him working, at home and at work. Where are the videos of the times he chopped up a tree that fell in our yard? He remodeled our home, starting with the addition of two bedrooms and a half bath, adding updates to the main bathroom, putting up drywall in our living room where knotty pine paneling had been, re-doing our kitchen with new cabinets. I could go on and on. I would usually try to help him, more often our sons helped with big projects, and mostly I just stood in the way – right where the ladder needed to be, or where he needed to stand. I was good at that. But I don’t have any pictures or videos of him in action. I regret that.
I have some video of him slalom skiing behind our speedboat. I also have some pictures of him barefooting off the boom of our boat. He loved the water, and skiing was his cherished pastime. I became an adept speedboat driver, and we were good to go. He also loved his Harley Davidson motorcycles, and I have a few pictures of him on his bikes. I have a few photos of us when we went camping, sometimes with our whole family. All of these pictures bring back happy memories and remind me of his adventurous qualities.
We married in 1984, so the pictures we have from half of our married life were taken on 35 millimeter cameras. These pictures are in albums in a bookcase in my living room. Unlike digital photographs, these pictures are precious and irreplaceable. We have opened those albums many times, looking for old photos of my parents, his parents, our children when they were young. We took out dozens of pictures of my husband to be used for his funeral. People were astonished at how “beautiful” we were when we were young. I am glad I have photographic proof of that.
If I could do it all again, I would take even more photographs and many more videos of my husband. I wish I had showcased how amazing he was for all of posterity.
Joshua distinctly treated his classes differently. He had advanced classes that he gave special treatment to, instead of treating all of his classes the same. He had dextrous kids in the advanced classes, and he worked at getting all of them into the same class instead of dividing the classes up equally. The advanced classes didn’t have to work as hard, so they had more time for fun activities. They had chances to earn special activities. The other classes had a hodgepodge of activities, but none were special or fun.
The advanced kids were vain due to their special treatment. They were doing a project on the environment and its growth and had taken numerous photographs trying to identify the different flora and fauna.
Joshua praised his advanced classes and planned special programs just for them. All but ignoring his less advanced classes.
My sister in law had the right idea when she collated all of her old photographs into a collage on a coffee table.
Hubby and I did a similar thing in picture frames and the one above is my Generations combi. The red headed boy on the left is my nephew who was 50 last year, and there are pictures of my parents, grandfathers, great grandparents, nieces, nephews and siblings.
These are reworks of the framed pictures we had in the cottage which we laminated to hang in the boat (thank you blu tac).
When we took the dartboard down in the hall, we went through a huge box of photographs depicting our life together and put them in a frame. Such happy memories are contained therein.
Photos today are mostly digital, no more of the 35mm, 110 or 126 cartridges which you sent away to be developed and were lucky to get one or two decent shots.
Hubby is good at tweaking images, and did so for the canvas pictures of Maggie and Kizzy which are hanging on the wall behind me with Barney’s picture. That was a snapshot I took in the bungalow and when we lost him, we took it up to a photographer who worked his magic. I cried when we collected it a week later as it was just like having him there.
Of course now we have Maya and my camera chips and phone gallery are full of her images.
I have a lovely picture of my parents taken on their 25th wedding anniversary in 1975 and have featured it often. My Dad is wearing a cardigan my Mum had knitted and it is my dearest wish to be cremated in it with the pockets full of dog biscuits.
My precious photos are of and with my hubby. Sometimes I sit and cry, sometimes I laugh at silly memories. Photographs captured that moment when we walked across a stream. When we returned hours later the tide had come in and the stream was a deep salt water channel. I lost my bike pump into the water and when I got it out to use again it had gone rusty. Photos can be like that. They can fade. And memory fades too, so photos make it easier not to forget.
Squirreljan:
My sister and I are going through the hundreds of photos of our parents, us growing up, us now. Our whole lives are in those pictures and the fun and love we all had for each other from the very beginning.
Memories such as helping Dad clear snow, reading with Mum, skipping, playing two balls, being taken to all sorts of places in London (both Mum and Dad were from South London and wanted to ensure we understood our heritage). One photo we all have in our homes was of me and Sally looking like two little urchins at Petticoat Lane market in around 1968. We are holding three monkeys! We loved it.
Losing Dad recently has made these photos even more nostalgic and precious. As kids in the sixties, when Dad took and developed his own photos, I remember him having a sheet hanging up to give him a dark room. I had a Brownie camera when I was about seven and I am still obsessed with taking photos – although these are now on the phone.
One thing this whole sad situation has really brought home to me is that photos just don’t mean the same when viewed on a phone. How special is it to open an album or scrapbook and relive sometimes forgotten times with your family and friends? Incredibly special because it’s not just the photo, but also the ability to touch, stroke, and feel. That doesn’t happen on a phone – view, scroll, move on! The world is too fast!
Luckily, I have a tendency to print photobooks of special times, and surround myself with photos in my writing room. The last book I did was a themed one on Malvern skies that I’d taken over the past seventeen years. I’m now going to do more of these books. The hard thing will be choosing which photos to include.
What do you see
Looking at this photograph?
A little girl
Sitting on a wooden floor
Wearing a sunhat
And a quizzical expression
Just an ordinary little girl
What don’t you see
Looking at this photograph?
The recent, tragic death
Of a father – a bread winner
The bravery of a young mother
Seeking a new life
For herself and
Her baby daughter
Beneath the wooden deck
Of the passenger liner
On which the child sits
Are all their worldly possessions
Packed into wooden crates
And old-fashioned trunks
They are travelling far away
From family and friends
From their normal life
Over the ocean
Towards a different country
A southern African country
Hopefully, they will find
New opportunities
Away from memories
And a way to forge forward
Adapting to the strong sun
A different culture
Foreign languages
A completely different
‘Normal’ way of life
Not such an ordinary little girl
After all
When I was growing up, my mother kept all our family photos in albums. Picture-taking back then was an event, a major production, and all the photos were lovingly saved in albums to be admired. So it came as quite a shock to me when I started dating my now husband to discover that his mother kept their beloved family photos in cardboard boxes! And they weren’t organized, either ….. they were simply tossed in. When the family felt like passing the time looking through old photos, down came the boxes from the closet shelf and the fun would begin.
It really was fun ….. a family happening. We’d all sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and going through boxes of photographs. We’d stick our hand in a box and pull out a photo; we had no idea which one we’d come out with since they were all mixed together. There’s a story behind each photo, often funny, sometimes sentimental or sad. But it was always an adventure.
When Bill and I got married and started collecting our own photos, I decided to follow his family tradition of keeping the photos in boxes. Yes, we have our beautiful wedding album and endless volumes of photo books of the grandkids which are lovely to look at but predictable. Now we sit around our kitchen table with our sons, daughters-in-law and grandkids, and sometimes, instead of playing cards or a board game, we’ll pour over boxes of photos, reminiscing, telling stories and laughing like crazy.
And really, when you think about it, isn’t having a great time with the ones you love more important than just about anything? Yeah, I thought you’d agree.
***
Esther Chilton 
Leave a comment