This past week has brought tragic news to our family. A family member in a distant country is very ill. He has three children who may eventually have to come to live with family in the United States. These children do not know us and a transition like that will be difficult.
My husband may be joining his father in this far-off country in the next week to help get affairs in order. It dawned on me this morning that we need to send photos. We need photos of every Aunt, Uncle and cousin these children don't know. We need smiling faces and names to go with them. They need a photo book they can keep there and look at and get to know the people in the photos so we are more familiar to them.
So, I will gather the photos and create a book of friendly, happy relatives in America that they can get to know. I will send it with my husband if he goes and, hopefully, the photos will help these children get to know us better.
A few months ago I watched a movie on Netflix, called Sweet Land, about a foreign born mail-order bride coming to middle America just after World War I. She had a single photo of the man she was going to marry. The problem was, it had been folded up and put into a letter to her. Her intended husband's face was in the middle of the fold. The thick cardboard of the old photo caused so much damage on the small face that he was unrecognizable. So, when she showed up at the train station in his town, she spoke no English and had no idea what the man who was supposed to meet her there looked like. She hadn't been able to send a photo to him so he didn't know who he was there to meet either. Eventually, her intended and his friend finally found her after some confusion about the time she was supposed to arrive. She assumed his overly friendly friend was who she was there to meet and was rather disappointed when it turned out the quiet, gruff man with him was to be her husband.
We are lucky to have modern photographic technology where we are able to have more than one photo of ourselves because it's cheap and easy enough to take photos and we are lucky to have easy ways to easily share photos with others - no matter where in the world they are.
I'm old enough to remember when film was considered so pricey that you only dragged out the camera for special events and then you only got double prints when you were SURE you had a quality roll of film. And, it was terribly disappointing when you paid for film processing only to realize just 1/4 of the photos were worth the cost and the rest didn't turn out.
Photos truly connect us and make our lives more accessible to others. I'm grateful for that this week.
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