Making The Best Of A Bad Situation

What do you do when your family is being evicted from their home, have less than 72 hours there and NOTHING has been done in terms of packing or preparing to move in spite of them having known about the eviction date for over a month and you're a memory keeper?  Well, when THEIR priority is furniture, TVs, electronics, etc. and all you see when you walk from one overflowing room to another is piles and piles of damaged and unkempt photos, you commandeer every photo that you can find and relish in the delight as you find photos that you thought had long since been lost or destroyed (in spite of the fact that most aren't in great shape).

My sister and my Dad shared residences for at least 10 years before he passed, so of course, many of these photos are of my sister, her daughter, grandchildren, their friends and the families of their friends but in the mix are the very few precious photos that remain of MY own childhood.  My Mom kept all the good pictures of my younger years in 4 precious photo albums that my other sister borrowed without her knowledge and lost, so anything and everything that remains of my childhood was in that house and my sister was making zero effort to pack up the ONLY things in that house that were literally irreplaceable.  I must have said to my niece, 'why is no one going through this stuff, these are the ONLY things you own that literally cannot be replaced' a dozen times and all she could do was shrug and tell me that my sister had been saying she was going to go through all of that for months but never had.

I've been asking for the few photos I knew about since my Dad passed and just gave up on ever seeing them again.  But now, every photo that I found in their house, regardless of who was in it, is now in my possession.  The BEST find of everything (considering the condition of some of the photos I found) was a complete photo album from a HUGE family vacation we took when I was 8 years old.  I remembered going (I have a terrible memory and it often takes other people having conversations about an event to even spark the slightest recollection of it) and I knew there was an album (a few of the notes my sister made, I remember reading as she put it together) but didn't ever think it was still in one piece, let alone in mostly good condition with dates and notes throughout.  I could cry, I'm so happy.  There are a variety of other photos, including some of my Dad and I at various school events from when I was really young, photos of me when I was just a couple of years old where I can 100% see my daughter's face in my own, school photos, and the biggest single event set of photos there is a family photo shoot we had with me wearing my cap and gown around my kinder graduation.  Most of those pictures I was in a 'no teeth' smile phase because I hated how I looked with all of my missing teeth, but my 6 year old who has just recently lost his first 2 teeth, found one where I was smiling normally and he just loved that he got to see Mommy with some teeth missing, too.  I can't tell you how much it means to me to hold in my hands photos of me with my Dad, especially where he looks happy.  He'd always been a curmudgeon and had a reputation as such with my Mom's parents and siblings, but it wasn't until he sustained a severe back injury about 10 years before his passing where he was nothing but angry all the time...seeing him smiling on a vacation and in family photos means the absolute world to me.

Sure, I'll never have pictures of every year of my life (there are Christmas photos I remember looking at that I haven't seen in probably 15 years that are likely long gone by now, for instance) but far more exists than I EVER thought I'd see again!!  Now...to save up for ANOTHER portable scanner wand since I loaned that to the sister I took all these photos from and probably won't see again, so I can save digital copies of them!!