Hippy Happy........

How do you remember your childhood? I remember mine in colours; black,white,pink and orange.....I've put it down to the photographs my Mum used to take of us and the processing used by Kodak in the 70's! I've always been fascinated by photographs..... I'd sit alone in my bedroom and thumb through the albums my parents had created; I'd spend hours and hours gazing at them and making up stories to go with the pictures. I'd marvel at how perfect the pictures were, how colourful and how clever my Mum was!

I remember the hot summer of 1976, my sister and I spent days and days playing outside amongst the charred, yellow grasses. Swinging higher and higher on our tyre swing, and having tea parties in my Dad's newly and freshly built shed that smelt of warm wood and tarnish......... blowing bubbles, into the blue sky........hippy, happy times......

Mark and I are leaving our house of 4 yrs and moving to our own little 'shack in the woods'. It's meant that items in storage have been dragged out and dissected. Downsizing means no room for crap! I can't afford to be sentimental! So out came boxes and boxes of my Mum's photographs. When she died, I was given a lot of the albums - I couldn't bear to look at them at the time, so I put them in a box and sealed the lid, secretly hoping I actually wouldn't have to look at them again. But yesterday, I felt good. I opened the boxes and started going through the same pictures I had gone through when I was 5. How I felt when I had my photograph taken all those years ago, came flooding back! My Mum really did capture a lifetime memory filled with emotion. The joy, the trust in my Nanna as she swung me higher and higher, the heat on my face, the tightness of my shoes which I just wanted to rip off, the smell of the warm grass and the heat of the tyre on the back of my legs! I remember all of this as tho it was yesterday........

My Mum loved sunflare!

Having gone through 35 yrs worth of dust, humidity, sticky little hands, moths (yes I found dead moths) the albums are a little worst for wear; so I've decided to painstackingly go through each of them and scan and repair the photographs. I have no idea how long it'll take me {another 35 yrs perhaps} but I don't want these memories to be lost.

I left all the photographs strawn across the bedroom floor to attend to laundry duties {deep joy}, when I got back upstairs I found Ollie, sitting cross legged on the floor, also marvelling at the photographs - it could have been me, all over again................. 1974....... 2009......they're just numbers, our childhoods are still the same, hippy & happy.....

XX Annie XX