Photographs brighten the day

I never lost faith, but I will have to admit that when the call finally came, it was a complete surprise. My pictures are finally back. I had given them to the helpful girl at the drug store way back in January. I checked every week or so but they never did return from being developed.
I am old-fashioned in some ways. I prefer real film to digital photography. I want something I can touch, not some new technology I barely understand. Don’t get me wrong, I am perfectly capable of taking digital photos, I simply prefer film.
I assumed that the process was taking so long because of the nasty winter weather. Snow, ice and excessive cold slows everything down. After a month or so I gave up on that theory and figured they were merely misplaced.
Were they hiding on a shelf in the store? Did they get waylaid at the post office? Did the developer have them stashed somewhere? I may never know.
It is fair to say that my first guess was wrong. All of the helpful women working at the store searched multiple times. No film and no pictures were to be found. The manager even got in on the act and offered compensation, which I turned down. I concluded that the film was either at the post office or the developer just waiting for the ideal time to reappear. I had faith that it would show up eventually.
I continued to ask about the missing pictures every time I stopped for milk or whatever. I think they got tired of me asking, but they were always nice about it. I have since learned that mine weren’t the only photos that came up missing.
Yesterday, I was sitting at home, wondering what project to begin, when the phone rang. It was Rebecca, one of the women who work at the store. She said the store printer started printing by itself and when she checked to see what it was doing, it was spitting out the long lost images.
I was flabbergasted. I figured it would be summertime before they finally showed up. I went to retrieve them and found out that there was no charge. That was the icing on the proverbial cake. Now I can decide which ones to send to my mother so she can see for herself what we did the last time we visited the grandkids.
These photographs won’t win any contests. The composition is a little off in some of them and a couple are out of focus. The subject matter doesn’t have universal appeal. The world wouldn’t have come to an end if they were never found.
Still … they are precious to me. They are a tangible record of the love that my family and I share. They capture the grandchildren at a particular moment in their lives. My daughter smiles in one and looks as beautiful as she is. My son-in-law is captured as his children, clad in their superhero costumes, crawl over him. The prints are evidence that love abounds in the family.
I think about all the old pictures that my mother keeps stored away. Those black and whites are of long dead relatives and friends. The prints contain clues about the people who have made us who we are. I wonder if someday somebody will look at these pictures that finally reappeared and see their own long dead relatives. Will they see the happiness in the faces depicted on the paper? Will they see themselves in the images?
They are just family pictures, no more, no less. Rebecca made my day when she called to tell me they had finally materialized. It was as if the sun had finally emerged in the middle of a dreary day and proved that I was right to keep the faith. Nothing is ever truly lost. Everything turns up eventually.[[In-content Ad]]