Glancing through my Facebook photos, I come across a picture dated July 11th, 2007. It is a
picture of Jacob, Tristan and I at the hospital, our first picture as a family.
For me, to look at a picture is to travel through time. I am taken back to that moment in my life,
reliving every bit of it; thoughts and emotions.
July 11th, 2007 was the first happiest day of my life. Looking at this picture, I am once again
on the fourth floor of Newman Regional Health, nineteen years old and a first time mom. I
remember the overwhelming emotion that overtook me as Tristan’s first tiny cry escaped. The
feeling of warm tears falling down my cheeks is both an old and new sensation because thinking
back to this moment, I begin to cry. I remember an eighteen year old boyfriend who not once left
my side in our three day stay. This was the same boyfriend that would sneak our baby out of his
bassinet or from beside me in the hospital bed during the middle of the night to hold him close
while they both slept.
There is a school picture of me, taken in probably the second or third grade, sporting a badly
scraped up nose. My family was living in a trailer south of Emporia and the roads that ran
throughout the park were gravel. One day while riding my bike, I seemed to overlook a good
sized rock in the road. My front tire struck it and I was sent flying over the top of the bike’s
handlebars, landed in gravel and felt the trickle of blood down my face and over my hands.
Wouldn’t you know? School picture day was just a few days away. Looking back at this picture,
my nose begins to hurt only to be followed by my hurting eyes. I was wearing a t-shirt with the
word “groovy” written across it in bright green, pink and purple lettering.
On the top of my mom’s dresser sits a picture frame engraved with the year 2004. The light
wooden frame holds a picture of myself with my Grandmother and three of my great aunts;
Babe, Janice and Betty. The picture was taken after breakfast on Christmas morning of that
year. The women in the picture are holding up frames with a poem about the three of them
written by yours truly. Ever since I was a little girl, these three women have been an inspiration
to me. I wrote this poem in the hopes of giving them something that might mean as much to
them as they mean to me.
These are just a few examples of why photography is so important to me. It enables me to relive
a moment time and time again. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but to me it is so
much more than that.
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