I have a closet full of clear plastic tubs. These tubs contain, in snapshots, the story of my life. Some of the pictures date back to the early 1900s, before the “Charleston” was a dance that made old folks blush. Some contain images of a cute little boy with slicked-down hair and a part sharp enough to cut steak.

Some are of cows. Yes, I said cows. Who takes pictures of cows?

There are wedding pictures from various decades of young couples with cake smeared on their faces. Kids playing in the sand at the beach. Kids covered in birthday cake. Kids playing in boxes surrounded by Christmas paper and expensive toys that prove not to be as interesting as the boxes.

Good Lord, we took a lot of pictures at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The babies in these pictures are now responsible adults with mortgages and dental appointments and babies of their own. I’m pretty sure they are taking more pictures right now of moments that one day will be kept for their own trip down memory lane.

One thing about being a senior adult is that, not only do I have all the pictures I have taken, but I have accumulated all the pictures that once belonged to other family members who have gone on to their eternal rest. Pictures I never knew existed until now.

I saw a picture yesterday of Marvin Daniel’s Grocery Store in Hampton from 1936. I have a picture of my Aunt Francis with Uncle Paul and their sons from, I’m guessing, the late 60s. Wesley and Larry and Don and Terry standing on a staircase in suits. Young men in smiles.

There is no organization within these tubs of photos. I have neither the time nor interest to catalogue and put all these pictures together by family, decade, and name. I have tried to keep some semblance of order. Meaning that if I open a pack of photos and rifle through them, I put them back in the same envelope. Said envelope may or may not go back in the same tub.

Digging through the picture tubs is like a different archaeological dig each time I go into the closet. I have no idea what tub holds what pictures. I have a picture in mind that I want to find but I have absolutely no clue where to find it.

I’m okay with that. Finding a certain picture may take me three days, 14 hours and 27 minutes but each time the hunt is an adventure. I can sit on the floor for hours and go to places like the Grand Canyon, Falling Waters in Pennsylvania, or a campfire above Amicalola Falls. I can be 17 holding a snake in Fitzgerald, Georgia or I can be fishing in Canada with my dad.

The possibilities are endless.

It only takes one picture to transport me to another place and time. One image and I am suddenly flooded with the stories of my life.

My tubs of photos have been replaced by digital files which is good and bad. I like holding a picture in my hands. But I’m not complaining. There are some distinct advantages to the digital age. Use to, I’d carry three or four pictures in my wallet. Now I have an encyclopedia of pictures with me at all times.

An old friend whom I hadn’t seen in years might ask, “Hey, how are the kids?”

I’d pull out my wallet and show him my three pictures and talk about what they were doing now and how they were growing up. The pictures were usually outdated.

If you ask me today about my kids, beware. I can pull out my digital storage device, which is occasionally used as a telephone, and I can suck away an hour of your life showing you the 3,987 pics of my kids that I carry around with me. I can easily make you wish that you had never asked about what I’ve been up to with my 456 pictures of Colorado. 592 pics of my trip to Mexico. 347 pics of what I had for supper last night. Want to see my G-kids? I’ve got more pics at my fingertips than a swamp has mosquitoes.

Slowly but surely, I am trying to bring some of these pictures out of the tubs and onto my walls or shelves. I am trying to turn some of my digital treasures into print that I can frame and put on display. I want some of these moments in life to be visible where I can enjoy them without having to dig for them.

I took some old black and whites to a guy in Lagrange a few weeks back. My grandfather on the Still side of the family sitting in an old jalopy when he was 18 in 1919. My mother and her sister Hazel, the only picture I’ve ever seen of the two of them, standing beside an early 40s black car, pleated skirts and bobbysocks, stylish hair, and lipstick so thick you can see the red even though there’s no color.

He digitized a dozen or so pics for me and gave them to me on a thumb drive. And like magic, they’re out of the box and in frames around my house.

But I’m not done.

I spent some time this morning going through some of the pics on my phone. So many of the framed pics around the house are old and outdated. My G-kids are getting older. My girls have been married long enough that I ought to be ashamed that I don’t have pictures up of them with their families.

It’s time to bring my story up to date. I’ve moved some of my favorites from my phone to a thumb drive. I’ll be headed to CVS shortly. Yesterday I took down a bunch of the framed pics I have so that I can replace them with new pics.

I’m not throwing the old pics away. That would be like throwing away a part of my history. Every picture is a keeper. Every picture tells some little piece of who I am and where I’ve been in this life. I’ll tuck them into an envelope, and I’ll take that envelope and find a place in one of my tubs. The tubs will go back into the closet.

There is so much of life that we capture through the lens of a camera. When I stop and think about it, the very concept of picture taking is astounding to me. The idea that you can point and shoot and preserve a moment in time is like having a window to your world. Every picture taken connects the dots between who we were and who we are to become.

Life changes one frame at a time. The past is not the present, and yet the present never erases the past. Each frame tells a story all its own. We keep the old ones because we don’t want to forget. We shouldn’t forget. But new pictures come into focus all the time.

And each new picture tells another piece of the story.