Jeane Emily DuBose

Snapshots Left Behind

There’s nothing sadder than an old photo left behind. Vintage snapshots are all over flea markets and antique stores. Growing up, my parents threw all our family photos in a bottom drawer in our kitchen and I would spend evenings flipping through pictures of my parents before I knew them, as children and young adults, smiling, glaring, goofing off with people I didn’t know. There was magic in these moments captured on paper-- the realization that two people I knew so deeply had once lived lives I would never be privy to. Eventually, the drawer of photos in the kitchen became a box of pictures in the attic-- presumably my father was annoyed with me constantly being underfoot when he was trying to make spaghetti. Soon, no new pictures were being added to the box. I was born in the mid 90s, so moments of my childhood were captured and placed in photo albums and in picture frames. But my brother, born in 2001, had a life captured on digital cameras and later iPhones. Eventually, I forgot about the box and the magic of photographs.