I really enjoy taking photographs. I never did take any before the advent of the digital cameras; I left it always to Irving. To, in a sense, pictorially document our lives. So we have photographs that are very old, of course, long before coloured photography was even invented. They've been kept in photograph albums that are now almost 70 years old. Photographs of us before we were married, when we were still in our mid-teens. Photographs that predate that era, of when we were young children, of our parents when they were middle-aged, of relatives now long gone.

Our wedding photographs, professionally taken and memorialized in an ornate, white-satin-bound album, has been falling apart for decades. Albums that followed and are also of that vintage have also not stood the test of time. Where photographs of our children as infants and in the various stages of their childhood have been housed for many decades. They're sixty years old. In there are also photographs of our siblings, of their weddings, of family events.

I was looking through one of those old albums trying to curate certain photographs that I meant to copy and send by email to a relative. And looking at the photos of us when we were young parents, both of us found it odd, to view ourselves as we appeared so long ago. In fact, we hardly recognized ourselves. Actually, I recognized Irving well enough, but not myself. I hadn't realized back then that this was what I looked like. And nor did he, he said I had been beautiful and, he added, still am -- at age 86. That little bit of diplomacy.

I knew we had an album bought before the digital camera came to live with us, that had never been used. It has sat among the countless albums filled with photographs for many years. I doubt anyone even manufactures photograph albums any longer. So I thought that I'd set a task for myself, remove all the photographs from the albums that were falling apart and place them in the never-used album.  I'd do that, I told myself, on our return from our afternoon ravine circuit.

 

We were presented with yet another beautiful midsummer day, not hot, but mostly sunny and a brisk, cooling breeze. Jackie and Jillie know it's a Saturday, because they recognize the days of the week by the kind of after-breakfast treat they're accustomed to. Because it's a Saturday they also know we'd be getting out earlier than usual, so they were prepared. As I changed upstairs, they ripped through the bedroom in a pandemonium of exuberant expectation, leaping from loveseat to bed and racing one another into the bathroom, skidding on the rugs and exasperating me in the mess they leave behind. On the other hand, their spontaneous joy and rip-snorting activity is so hilarious, they're excused.

 

In the ravine we were surprised to see the presence of a purple coneflower plant flowering among the tall, thick bracken on the forest floor. Vying with the still-flowering thimbleberries and newly-flowering pilotweed for flamboyant admiration from us. A stray seed picked up by the wind from nearby gardens, or even someone carrying the coneflower seed in on their boots, who knows? It's delightful to see it.

Once under the forest canopy the sun's warming rays were modified by the breeze, the trail underfoot still damp from yesterday's rainfall, and we all loped alongside the creek, taking our time. Then up to the ridge above the creek, watching Jackie and Jillie minutely inspect all the vegetation and linger wherever messages were left by their friends who had been in for their own forays through the forest earlier in the day.

 

While up on the ridge, Irving heard a duck, and then once again, although we thought they had all since departed a month earlier. Then we heard one of the barred owls calling. A half-hour later as we approached the pollinating meadow we watched as three woodpeckers flew through the stand of trees before us, a mature pair of pileated, and with them a juvenile almost the size of its parents. At our distance we could make out the bright red cap of the male, and in a moment's time they all flew off.

 

At the pollinating meadow Irving found ample tiny wild raspberries to pick, and a handful of ripe-and-ready thimbleberries. Jackie and Jillie wait patiently until the picking activity is completed, then offer their expertise in taste-testing to liberate the berries from Irving's palms.

By the time we complete our circuit and amble down the street to our house, we feel hot and exercised. Time to linger briefly in the garden, to sit awhile and look about at the floral display, pleasing our aesthetic sense of garden culture.

 

I did, later, spend a frustrating hour trying to remove those old photographs in an intact state from the destroyed albums. The thick, boardlike pages of the albums are covered with a sticky material that held the photographs in place. Peeling the photographs off the sticky boards was time-consuming and the result not completely satisfactory; a few tears here and there. Then tucking the photographs into the clear plastic 'pockets' of the unused alternate album was itself an exercise in frustration.

I finally left the task half-done; retaining those parts of the old album still useful, and adding the new album to those that stood in the storage cupboard, telling myself I'd return to the job another time, and complete it -- knowing I likely won't.