Upstairs in my studio is a jumble of old photographs and boxes of slides from my youth in shoe boxes beneath a work table. Those of you from the “pre-digital” age might relate to this. When my son was born over thirty years ago I changed my ways and carefully 
documented his life and our life as a family in tidy photo albums- until he left home. Currently, my photos are all on my cell phone or floating in “The Cloud.” Now and again I think that I should go through and sort out my old photos into albums. But then I ask “Why?” I’m not famous. I have no grandchildren.
They have no meaning other to myself and will mostly be recycled as with my physical body. Maybe if I’m lucky some will wind up in some artist’s collage.
Shoe Boxes
When I die he will find them
Decades of my life
Stored in shoe boxes upstairs
Hundreds of captionless photos tucked in envelopes
Slides stacked neatly in folding Kodak boxes
Captured by a cheap camera
In eager hands
They illustrate the stories
That have largely gone untold
The forces of my life
That sanded me smooth on the inside,
Carved on the surface
Experiences of a young woman
Seeking adventure
And a place at the world’s table
When he finds them
He will see a younger me
With unnamed friends and unnamed lovers
Unnamed mountains
Unnamed rivers
Smiling
He will see walruses basking on rocks,
But not hear their music
Cabins, but not feel their warmth
Trails, but not know their destinations
My stories will die with me
Melding into the ethos
He will never know my joy
My youthful dreams
My pain and disappointments
The person before Mother
The me before you
By Alanna Pass 
That is always the dilemna…what to do with our treasures… a cousin of my husbands found her mother’s old journals, the type that just list the mundane daily activities..nothing to exciting and she organized them and published them for family…I love reading them and looking at the photos, you get a real sense of what life was like.
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I did not mention my boxes of journals I’ve kept since I was a teenager….. Hmmm- I wonder if anybody would find growing up in our generation interesting in the future?
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