Looks like love, smells like baby

I just ordered photo prints for my mother from Walmart.com. Say what you will about Walmart, it's perfect for this because my mother doesn't do computers or cameras, but she does shop at Walmart. All she will have to do is pick them up when they come in--at the Walmart in her town. It's brilliant, honestly.

I was always the one in the family who brought a camera and took pics, and I was a film holdout. I regularly took film to be processed and I shared my prints with my mother. Then at a certain point I realized that she was still bugging me about getting pictures of my nieces and nephews for her, and I said, wait--those children have parents!! So she finally quit asking me. Now that I am using a digital camera exclusively, it hasn't even been an issue.  It's weird. The whole thing is weird. To think that a grandmother is essentially excluded from seeing pictures of the kids because she has been left in the technological dust--no computer, no fancy cell phone equals no pictures of your grandchildren. And it's weird that I just now realized that I have not seen a physical print of any of the photos I have taken since I got my new camera for Christmas.

I'm obviously not the first person to moan about this, but these photos we take all the time, share online, email and post on facebook don't have the same meaning as the pictures we grew up with. In my family it was a fairly rare occurrence to get the old pictures out. So it was special. Every picture you looked at reminded you of that hat--oh my god that hat I wore all the time!--the trip you took to spend Easter with your friend in Germany. And of course the black and white pictures of my father and his sister taken in front of a wooden fence in about 1933...being especially scarce, they are really precious.

This is my effort to make pictures matter again.  I like taking pictures and telling a story with them, even if it is just "hey, it's Spring here and we have great landscaping!"