OK, getting this done just under the wire before the next week’s assignment is posted!
For Week Two, we were asked:
If you had to leave your house at a moment’s notice . . . if, for example, your house was on fire, what would you take? I’m going go out on a limb and assume you want all the living creatures in your house to survive and that you’re going to be taking them with you. But, what possessions do you value? What are the things in your life that are so important to you that you would spend the very spare moments that you have left to collect them?
I spent the last week down in Florida with my babies, my mom, and my sister. I didn’t have access to my kiddo’s baby boxes or my huge collection of old photographs. And happily, I went digital long before my wedding, or my kids were born, and all of that is already backed up to the cloud, on Flickr, using Backblaze, etc. Would I be crushed to lose that stuff through a disaster? Absolutely. But it didn’t feel like something I needed to photograph.
My husband and I both recently read the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, which I highly recommend. In it, and the reason I mention it, she has you go through your house, all your possessions, and hold each one up, asking “Does this bring me joy?” If it doesn’t, you discard it. When I thought about that, about what made it through the purge, about something I might not already have on me like my necklace with my kids’ names or my wedding and engagement rings, or might not have in my camera/diaper bag by the front door, there was one easy answer. This bracelet:
This was bought for me by my mom at a local craft fair in downtown Denver, shortly after I moved to Colorado. At the time, the three bears represented myself, my husband, and his daughter. Later, it represented my husband (still the big bear), my stepdaughter, and my son. Now, it represents, my amazing stepdaughter, my son, and my baby girl. I don’t even know the artist to have it recreated if it were lost.
If I had ten minutes, and my family was safe, I would grab it.
