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Memories by Bev. Jackson Cotter

It all started with a text message from my great-granddaughter. She sent me a picture of a 550-piece puzzle her family had just completed. It was a delightful scene containing nine cats, all different colors, different personalities, cute and cuddly. She knows I enjoy doing puzzles and watching images develop.

In response to the cat pictures, I found in a photo album, a picture of her mother when she was only 2 years old and my special Siamese friend Sam. I captured the picture on my phone and sent it back to her. That was the beginning of a delightful text conversation about the other pictures on that album’s page — her grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and especially my mother, her great-great-grandmother. When I mentioned the five generations’ difference between her and my mother, the response was,

“Wow, that’s amazing!”

That conversation took place because of our modern-day combination smart phone and camera, but it wouldn’t have taken place without a photo album containing pictures almost 40 years old.

I have always enjoyed old scrapbooks and albums from family collections and museum archives, valentines pasted on pages discolored with age, pictures of once in a lifetime family vacations, letters from sons and husbands serving overseas during World War II or Vietnam or even from our Southern States during the Civil War.

Memories that bring smiles or tears long after the pictures were taken or the letters were written.

Several years ago, I came across a scrapbook compiled by a woman I knew to be community-minded, active in her church, independent, and stoic. Her husband had passed away several years earlier. They had no children. She had known for sometime that she was dying of cancer and had sorted and tossed several items. Yet, she saved a scrapbook filled with cutout magazine pictures of babies, laughing, crying, playing, sleeping, just being babies. I wonder how many times she had turned those pages over, enjoying the pictures, and wondering “What if?” I understand now there was a piece of her personality that we never knew.

What is the value of an old scrapbook, a photo album? People often say, “There are no names. We don’t know who those people are, so we threw them away.” So be it. But with each of those pictures, those souvenir items, those letters, there is a person, a memory, a laugh or a tear, maybe sometimes anger. And maybe for us, a reminder of who we really are.

Five generations connected that day because of today’s amazing technology, and a 40 year old scrapbook.

Bev Jackson Cotter is a lifelong Albert Lea resident.