Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

I have to organize my photos. Well, not all of them, but there’s a whole 2021 backlog on my phone that I really need to go through and then delete off the Cloud or else I’ll start getting those warning messages that my phone is NOT backed up and that Certain Doom will thus occur. I hate those messages so much that last year, instead of doing the work of paring down what needed to be stored in my phone, I just paid the extra for storage. Now I am a slave to Apple to the tune of $1.35 per month.

Okay, so that’s not a terrible price for ensuring that my memories don’t disappear – it’s only about the cost of one third of a Starbucks Grande Caramel Macchiato (with oat milk). The cost of Starbucks drinks helps me to relativize a lot of purchases that, in theory, should be a lot more important than coffee. Like photos. Like memories.

But when I do get around to looking at the photos from my phone that Magically-Instantly download to my computer to see what I can delete off my phone, this is what I find: screenshots of memes and their cropped versions that I sent to someone, screenshots of my phone mid-podcast to remind me to go back and listen to something again (which I almost never do) and screenshots of texts to remind me to do something. Oh, and some genuine photos.

I’ve learned not to delete them all. While many of these things are actual pictures of people I love blowing out birthday candles or beside the huge pile of snow they just shovelled or selfies of a group of us hiking in Canmore or just me on the trails in Vermilion Provincial Park, the memes and the texting and the podcast screenshots are also moments in time. I save a lot of conversations with my kids or my husband (either for future enjoyment or for future proof of things that moms and wives need to prove to their beloveds). A snap of a podcast shows me what I was into at the time I took it. And All Those Covid memes will (hopefully soon) remind me of when we wore masks and bought a lot of toilet paper.

Some stuff has to go: the price of SPAM at Costco, the mysterious & blurry shots of my shoes, the doubles and tens and twenties when my phone was accidentally in burst mode. But the random and odd pictures that my phone seems to take of its own accord have the flavor of those old time real photos from the end of the Kodak camera reel: slightly exposed, weirdly angled and capturing something ethereal that just might be happy to look back at twenty years from now.

Maybe I don’t have to organize my photos just yet. Maybe I’ll just time-capsule them instead in a folder on my computer or buy a round of Starbucks for a year’s worth of storage. And then twenty years from now, like looking through a shoebox of photos, I can then wonder what the heck I was thinking. Or not.