Putting Memories By

Dear Diary,

Years and years ago I had a book, Putting Food By  by Janet Greene.  It was the bible of preserving food.  When I first bought this house I canned a lot of garden produce, tomatoes, pickles, jams and jellies.  I don't do that now.  Now, I focus on preserving memories.  I went to my memory pantry, aka my digital photo files, this morning to pull out one such memory.

My dear friends Karen and Hank were featured in a front page article about the devastation on St. John after two hurricanes last fall.  She sent me a link to the article yesterday.  I was so sad to read that the Moravian Church in Coral Bay is now gone, completely destroyed.  I have a photo of a door at the back of the church that I just love and one of the bell tower. There it was, still as I remember it but in reality it has vanished.  It just touched me deeply.  That is the real purpose of photography for me now, the preserving of precious memories.  In our memory pantry, through our photographs, everything is preserved and we can take them off the self and savor them at anytime.  The memory in our minds made fade with time but the photograph lives on.