I recently had a conversation with my friend and client Jean Tillery for her podcast, Epic Stories. One of the things we talked about was how every object we hold on to has a story of why it mattered enough to keep it.
That made me think: we take so many pictures of so many things. Do we remember the stories behind them?
I’m going to make an effort to start telling the stories behind some of the photos I find in my camera roll, starting with this one (my favorite story to tell every Spring):
I grew up in New York next to the Williams family. Their son was my age and was my first best friend, from when we were babies until boys and girls stopped being best friends (middle school-ish?). I spent a lot of time at their house, so the mom, Ms. Rosa, became like a second parent.
Ms. Rosa was, if I remember correctly, an air traffic controller for the US Air Force. On 9/11, she went into the city as a first responder to help however she could.
Some people may not know this, but there were so many toxins in the air after the towers came down that a lot of the first responders and others who were there ended up developing cancer in later years. She was one of them.
Not long before she passed, I was home from college and found a single tulip in a cup on the porch, with a note that read:
“You planted this tulip in my garden 15 years ago. Every year, it blooms to tell me that Spring is here and I think of you.”
I built my first house and moved in when I was 27. There was a flowerbed in front, so I went to the store to buy some bulbs to plant. I thought of Ms. Rosa and how beautiful a full-circle moment it would be if I planted tulips and could think of her every year as they bloom.
I grabbed the bulbs, planted them, and waited, so excited to reach out to her kids, send them a photo of their mom’s tulips in my flower bed, and tell them the story.
Well, they bloomed. And they were goddamn daffodils.
It’s been almost 4 years since I moved in, and every Spring my not-tulips bloom, and I hear Ms. Rosa laughing. She would’ve loved this story.