Power of a Photograph

In a box of old photographs, I found images of my grandmother holding me in front of a birthday cake. Our birthdays were only a day apart and we shared my first few cakes. I barely knew her. She would die from cancer before those cakes needed more candles than I had fingers on one hand.

These pictures are my primary memories. My older siblings can tell me things like how she cooked her cornbread and grew flowerbeds of irises. They can describe the rasp in her voice, probably from smoking too many unfiltered Camels.

I don’t carry those memories, but I do have a few photographs—enough to see features Honey and I share. I can see how tightly she holds me and how fondly she looks at the baby in her arms. All I have are a few photographs, but I know from them that she loved me fiercely.

Pictures have that kind of power. They tell us stories we never knew, they remind us of stories we forgot, and they show us stories about ourselves that we don’t see.

(click the blue button below to read the rest at Choose Courage Foundation).