I SEE PICTURES AND MY MIND TELLS A STORY

Monday morning I got up at seven.

By almost noon, I was still in my jammies.

I had not washed my face. I had not gone downstairs to get on the treadmill. I had not dictated a story. I had literally spent almost five hours going through old photo albums on my phone and in the cloud.

And wow.

What a walk down memory lane.

Opening up the blog again somehow connected me with all of those photographs that have just been sitting out there in my Google Photos and iCloud storage. For most people, maybe that's not a particularly big deal. But for me, right now, it is.

I don't have a big trunk of photographs sitting in the next room.

That trunk is in storage.

I don't have all of my old scrapbook albums here with me. They're in storage too. Fifty years' worth of photographs, albums, little pieces of our lives — all packed away somewhere while we're out here living this nomadic life.

So Monday morning, the cloud became my photo album.

And I went through at least ten years of pictures.

I could look at a photograph and almost instantly know where I was, what was happening in our lives, what came before it and what happened afterward.

There were places I hadn't thought about in years. People who have come in and out of our lives. People who have changed. People we've lost. Children who aren't children anymore. Versions of ourselves that don't exist anymore either.

A lot has happened since I stopped writing my blog in 2011.

Times have changed.

We've all changed.

And somehow looking at those photographs brought all of it back into focus.

Where I've been.

Where we've all been.

How much life has happened in between.

At first, I thought I'd wasted my morning.

After all, it was nearly noon and I was still in my pajamas. The treadmill hadn't seen me. My face hadn't seen a washcloth. The story I was supposed to dictate hadn't been dictated.

But I wasn't really doing nothing.

I was remembering.

And this morning I realized something else about myself.

I see pictures and my mind tells a story.

That's just what happens.

This morning it was a picture from the trail camera here at our Kentucky house sit.

A bobcat.

That's all it was. One picture of a bobcat walking across the property.

Except my brain doesn't seem to know how to leave a picture alone.

Suddenly I was thinking about all the other pictures and videos I've taken during this house sit.

The deer that wander onto the lawn.

The spotted young deer that come so close I can photograph them from the house.

The turkeys that casually eat on the front lawn — until I open the front door and startle them and suddenly discover that, yes, turkeys can FLY.

The coyote caught wandering around at night.

And now the bobcat.

Being on 50 acres doesn't mean you don't have neighbors.

There's the story.

Then my brain added Old MacDonald Had a Farm as background music.

There's the Reel.

Then I found the trail-camera pictures of the other local wildlife.

Me.

Roger.

🤣🤣🤣

Apparently the trail cameras don't discriminate between the four-legged and two-legged residents.

Roger has even been caught on camera working around the property with power equipment. I've been caught strolling across the lawn.

Local footage brought to you by...the neighborhood watch.

And after seeing that bobcat wandering around in broad daylight?

I'm thinking my afternoon strolls may have been canceled.

Here kitty, kitty. 😳

This is how my mind works.

One picture becomes a thought.

The thought becomes a sentence.

The sentence connects to another picture.

That picture reminds me of something that happened twenty years ago.

And somewhere along the way, there's a story.

Maybe that's why I lost almost five hours Monday morning going through old photographs. I wasn't simply looking at them.

Every picture was opening another little door.

A place.

A person.

A memory.

A moment I'd forgotten.

A story I hadn't told yet.

I've always taken a lot of pictures. Sunrises. Sunsets. Trips. Houses. Animals. Food. Ordinary moments that probably didn't seem particularly important when I photographed them.

Maybe this is why.

Pictures help me remember not just what something looked like, but what life felt like when I took them.

My photographs aren't just a record of where I've been.

They're prompts.

And apparently I have thousands and thousands of them waiting for me.

I see pictures.

And my mind tells a story.

There's always a story

WHY INDY CAME BACK

We are currently on a 2.5 month house sit now, not a pet sit.

After four and a half years of pet sitting, that feels a little strange.

I’m used to having a cat around, more than one if I’m lucky.

And in the last 5 weeks, I’ve realized how much I miss having a kitty cat in the house.

So I did what I often do when something gets into my head: I started scrolling through old photos.

That’s when I found Indy again.

And Rocket.

And Junior.

Suddenly I was right back in that part of my life, remembering how our sweet cats came into our world and how much life we shared with them.

Anyone who has ever loved a pet knows exactly what comes with that love.

Joy, companionship, routines, little quirks, funny stories, and eventually the heartbreak of losing them.

It is devastating to lose a pet, but to lose 3 was absolutely heartbreaking.

You know from the beginning that you probably will not get to keep them forever, but somehow that never makes the goodbye easier.

Indy was our girl, and the first we picked from the litter.

Rocket and Junior were our boys, and they came to us soon after Indy stole our hearts.

I loved all three of them, and they were each wonderful in their own ways.

But Indy was my little girl, and actually tiny being the runt of the litter.

She was my baby.

And as I looked through those old pictures, I found myself missing her all over again.

Then I had an idea.

I started bringing Indy back into my life by putting her into some of the paintings I’ve created over the years.

It was surprisingly easy to use AI and drop the two of us into my paintings.

And once she was there, something opened up.

The stories just started flowing.

I began imagining what it would have been like if she had stepped right into those scenes with me.

Then I put her into one of my travel photographs.

And from there the story just kept growing.

Indy had become part of my creative world again.

She was such a sweet little girl, and I think she would have been endlessly curious about the world outside our home.

Our cats were indoor cats, and the only time they usually went outside was when they had to go to the vet, which meant they were definitely not fans of the car.

But they did travel with us once in a big way.

When we moved from Connecticut to Florida, we had three cats in the back seat.

That was probably the biggest trip we ever imagined taking with them, and trust me, that is a story for another day.

So yes, in their own way, our cats really did travel with us.

And now Indy is traveling with me again — just differently.

She is traveling through my photographs.

Through my paintings.

Through my imagination.

Through the life I’m living now.

She never actually cruised the world with us.

She never sat beside me in all the places we’ve been since those days.

But now I can imagine her there.

I can place her into the life we have now and let her peek into the world she never got to see.

Maybe that sounds silly to some people.

But I think grief and love often ask us to find our own ways of continuing the connection.

Sometimes we keep photographs.

Sometimes we tell stories.

Sometimes we bring someone we loved into our art and let them live there.

That is what I’m doing with Indy.

She was my little girl.

And now, in this sweet and unexpected way, she’s back in my life.

And honestly, I’m very glad she is.

Always in my heart.....never forgotten!

There's always a story!

If you would like to travel with Indy, you can follow along on her Instagram here:

Follow along