Watts Line: Memories one snap at a time | Columnists | Summerville Journal Scene

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Watts Line: Memories one snap at a time

Published Tuesday, March 10, 2009 2:10 PM

By Judy Watts
Summerville Journal Scene ®

We’re in the throes of wedding preparations for our oldest manchild with the big day just seven months off.

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from the bride’s sister, Fabulous Phoebe, that sent us on a mission.

“We’re going to have a video made for the reception,” her e-mail read.

“Cool,” I e-mailed back to her.

“We need photos of Sean growing up that we will match with photos of Maya growing up and we’ll play it on a screen during the reception.”

“That sounds great,” I responded, and immediately headed for “the drawer.”

During the early years of our marriage, I dutifully labeled and installed photos into albums. Even after the oldest man-child was born I pasted and scribbled dates and places into books of pictures.

But then child number two came along and we completely lost control of our lives. The drawer became the repository for our life memories. Roll after roll of film was developed, the photos “oohed” and “aahed” over and then placed in the drawer.

As the years ticked away, the once-empty three-foot-long drawer grew deep with photos. Occasionally I’d have to dig through the drawer to find photos for our guy-children’s school projects that had titles like “My Life,” or “My Family.”

(Those photos are still easy to spot in the drawer with their shards of green or orange construction paper clinging to their backs.)

So the great search began for photos of our Surfer Dude to be shown off on his wedding day. I sifted through the drawer, reliving our lives together one 4x6-inch paper at a time. All made me smile; some provoked an added tear.

I realized at some point during the search that while I was on a mission to provide shots for the video, I was on a tandem mission to share our baby, out little boy, the precious child we love so much with his new family who has known him only as an adult.

I could show them through the photos of the important and fun moments of Dude’s life what his growing up years had been.

They had not seen him as a newborn in his cradle in Germany. They weren’t on the soccer field when he was a four-year-old trying to kick the ball, or in the audience when he played a sheep in the third-grade school production or sat in folding chairs at the baseball field when he pitched his first game as a 12-year-old. They weren’t there when his grandfather taught him the intricacies of bass fishing.

Instead, they were watching their own wonderful daughter grow under their watchful gaze in their happy home. They were there as she did many of the same kinds of things that our Dude was doing.

So, our two families are sifting through photos that will be wedded together in a video that will try to put these two wonderful young people into the context of the loving families from which they came. I look forward to learning more about our beautiful daughter-to-be and the years when she was a little girl playing and laughing at her parents’ home while our sweet boy was laughing and playing in ours.

Contact Judy Watts at 873-9424 or jwatts@journalscene.com.

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104 East Doty Avenue | Summerville, SC 29483 | 843-873-9424 office | 843-873-9432 fax