Time has a strange way of moving. Logically, I know there is the same number of minutes, hours, days and months each year, but sometimes a block of time or an event goes by so quickly and other days drag on.
I was thinking about this as I downloaded over 1,600 photos and videos slowly off my phone’s memory card onto my computer. If I do the math, that’s about five photos and videos a day. A chunk of them fall into three major categories: our dogs playing, an item I need to buy at a store, or accidental screenshots of the home screen while trying to turn off the phone.
Pieces of 2024 flicker by as I watch the thumbnail images load during the transfer: driving down White Spar during a snowstorm in January on our way to a sunny beach vacation; my niece and her friends dressed up to go to the Renaissance Festival; building and stenciling the “Before I Die” chalkboards in our garage with a friend and taking them to the Chalk It Up festival; taking our dogs on a fox-tail infested trip to Yucca and having to drive to Lake Havasu to buy them boots or risk an expensive vet bill later; trying out my camping hammock and learning I’m at the age that hammocks aren’t the easiest to get in and out of gracefully; blurry shots of full moons and sunsets; closeups of cactus blossoms; my niece’s graduation; my dad’s birthday and one of the last photos I took of him and his girlfriend before her cancer got worse; hospice veteran celebrations; Mike’s birthday; my birthday.
Mike gives me a hard time about all the photos I keep. “You’ll never look at most of these again,” he tells me as I fill up yet another folder on my desktop. He’s probably right, but knowing they are there if I want to look at them is comforting to me. I agree there are too many but that’s the gift of our modern times. My camera is with me daily, just a finger press away on my cell phone. It costs nothing to take the photo, no film processing fees, and minimal space on the many gigabytes my hard drive stores. Why not take another video of the dogs wrestling? And I will always detour to the top of the Prescott Resort parking lot to snap another dozen photos of an incredible Prescott sunset to add to my ever-growing collection of Arizona sunsets.
Life is made up of so many tiny, seemingly insignificant moments. Most of them filter by in those seconds, minutes and days of our lives without being recorded. It can be hard to track what happened yesterday, much less last week, unless it was something exciting, important or difficult enough to make it worth remembering. Even watching my photographic year go by reminded me of things we had done and people who had visited that I’d already mostly forgotten about.
It made me think how I’d try each new year to start a diary, determined as a kid to write down more stories of my daily life but losing interest a few weeks into the project. Our phones have become the visual diaries of our lives, capturing the people we’ve seen, the places we’ve gone, and the things we’ve done with our lives. It makes me think five photos a day barely scratches the surface of anyone’s life.
In 1996, I bought one of the earlier digital cameras for the mass market. It was a Casio QV-10 with an LCD display on the back to show you what you were taking a photo of before you snapped the shutter. That doesn’t sound special now but back then, it was amazing. It held 96 images in its 2MB of memory, which seemed like a lot at the time, but now an average photo on my cellphone clocks in at 5MB. The day I got it, I wandered all over the warehouse district of Minneapolis, taking random shots of bridges and old buildings, deleting the bad ones with just a touch of a button. The resolution was minimal and the photos were small, but it seemed like magic to capture photos and play them back instantly on your camera.
It reminded me of being a kid when my folks had a Polaroid camera and we’d watch as the photo slowly developed before our eyes. I still have a few tiny photos of dearly departed pets and places we lived in Canada. (Even back then, pet photos made my list!)
If I dug through my files and found our first Boot Drop welcoming in 2013, it was just me and Mike, surrounded by strangers, brand new to Prescott. Now the photos and videos are filled with friends, family and acquaintances we’ve made along the way who will be hugging and cheering with us as we count down a fresh new year. That’s worth every bit of storage space it takes to remember.