I take a lot of pictures, probably at least one every couple of days, if not every day some weeks. I take pictures to preserve a moment, a memory, something funny or cute, or something I might want to include in a blog post or share on Instagram.

Of course, not all pictures I take are worthy of keeping. I’ve gotten pretty good at going through my photos every two or three days and deleting ones that really aren’t very good. I tell myself I could have done better, or ask myself with if this image is something I truly want to remember, and why. I go over with myself why a particular photo is worth keeping and from there sometime it stays and other times it still might get deleted. I go through my entire photo file once a year to see if I still want to keep everything, and because of my earlier culling it’s rare that a photo gets deleted during this process.

Photos of family members and family events usually always make the cut, but not all of them. Pictures from our travels over the years have been gleaned, and I am satisfied with the ones that remain and the memories they provide.

There are a few pictures though I keep for a different reason.

The picture of our living room at the top of the page is one of them. I see this room every day, so why do I keep this picture? It was taken when we returned from our trip up to Massachusetts last September for WenYu’s wedding. We’d been away for seven days, and this was the view that greeting me when I walked in the door of our apartment. Something I’ve seen hundreds of time.

This time though the room spoke to me, and said You’re home! Come be comfortable again.

I took a picture of that moment. And nearly six months later I still feel the warmth of that homecoming whenever I look at the picture. I still feel the welcome and the comfort.

There are a couple of other photos that speak to me, although with emotions deeper than mere memory. I still feel the deep, jumbled emotions I had as we left Kauai in May 2022 in the picture of the coastline, taken from the plane window as we took off. What are we thinking leaving Hawaii? We are so happy there? The green light in the second photo was located by the woods at our first apartment in Tennessee. I saw it every time I went out for a walk and for some reason felt a deep chill every time I walked past it. That light was always on, day and night, and there were no other green lights at the complex. And no one at the complex knew why it was green or why it was there. Just the picture still gives me an unsettled feeling.

All the photos in my files are memories and moments caught in time. All are beloved, but these other ones are kept because they spoke to me in a different way, in voices I can still hear and feel.