The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea

We are swimming in a sea of selfies and Instagram photos. Our history is being recorded on cell phones and our stories are being told in clever hashtags. Pictures are rarely printed- we simply release them into the cloud with zillions of bits, perhaps never to be seen again.

Our fine moments run together like ingredients in a recipe. At first, it is easy to see that the egg is separate from the flour and the milk from the oil – but with a few quick turns of the wooden spoon, a gloppy mass forms in the bowl- and it goes in the oven- come what may.
We bake the batter of life.

Pictures, journals and stories help us to extract the ingredients and understand the flavors — they unravel the mystery and tell us why one loaf tears like leather and the other like cotton.
Why one loaf is savory and the other sweet.
Why one loaf is dry and the other is doughy.

Stories matters. As mothers and fathers in the digital age, we must do something old fashioned and print the photos stored on our phones and in our hard drives. We must scribble a few sentences about our moments. Not “Children’s Museum, 2015”, but rather, “He never wanted to leave the water table- he played with the dam system for hours,”

Because lo and behold, he is now an engineer.

“Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding

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Quotes from: Goodreads
Image from JoAnne Ouellette, The New Curriculum Arithmetics, Copyright 1935