Monday, March 16, 2015

The Power of Memories

By Margaret Daley

For a blog post on another site, I was asked to find an old picture and talk about what happened in it. It could be when I was a child or later. I thought okay, I can do that. No problem. I have albums and drawers full of photos of me as a child and young married wife and new mother. I used to take tons of pictures of my son, family get togethers and vacations.

Then I started looking through my pictures. I wasn't prepared for all the memories inundated me with each one I looked at. I hadn't gone through my photos in years, and suddenly I was seeing my son when he was a child (he's 36 now). There were pictures of my mother and father (both dead for years now) of my two brothers and my stepfather as well as my grandmother and other family members.

For years I've been guilty of stashing those pictures away in a drawer or album, never taking an evening to look at them and remember what happened around the photo being taken. We have such a wealth of memories--both good and bad. As a writer I've used my experiences in my past to help me  shape my characters and even write about incidents that happened to me years ago. So looking at these pictures gave me a lot of memories to draw on as a writer.

What memories do your pictures bring to mind for you? Have you looked at your old photos recently?

Bio: Margaret Daley, a USA Today’s Bestselling author of over ninety books (five million sold worldwide), has been married for over forty years and is a firm believer in romance and love. When she isn’t traveling, she’s writing love stories, often with a suspense thread and corralling her three cats that think they rule her household. To find out more about Margaret visit her website at http://www.margaretdaley.com.

My recent book is To Save Her Child. The blurb is: When a young boy goes missing from wilderness day camp, Alaskan search and rescue worker Josiah Witherspoon is on the case. The brooding ex-marine promises to find the child and return him to his worried mother. But he doesn't know that Ella Jackson has a secret past. One that could put them all in danger. When tensions mount, Ella needs to tell Josiah the truth—but she can't set aside her fears enough to trust him. Ella and Josiah are ready to risk their lives to save her son, but will they risk their hearts, as well?  

Alaskan Search and Rescue: Risking their lives to save the day

6 comments:

  1. This is a sweet post, Margaret. I love looking at old family pictures, but I'm guilty of sticking them away in a drawer and not doing something useful with them or making them accessible to other family members.

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  2. Patricia, I'm so glad we can scan them into the computer but for me to do that for everyone would take a LONG time.

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  3. Margaret, I can relate to the memories of old photos. I've got tons of photos in albums, too. I like my digital photos because I see them on my computer rather than having them stuck in a drawer of cupboard somewhere.

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  4. Lovely post ,Margaret! I need to make the time to scan in all those old photos one of these days instead of leaving them hidden in a drawer!

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  5. I love the old pics as well but recently went through and destroyed a few I thought should never see the light of day ever again!! Fortunately there are literally hundreds to get sentimental about!

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  6. Strange, only this morning I pulled out a bottom drawer and on the floor at the back of the chest was an old photo that had fallen off the window sill behind it. It was me holding my daughter as a toddler and my son when he was a baby. It brought back many memories of when we first moved to the house we have now.

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