As we are approaching the end of the semester here at St. Bonaventure, I am starting to feel extra sentimental as I usually do at this time of year.
I reflect on how lucky I am to be living in an off-campus house next year with friends who I adore. I reflect on how lucky I am to be part of two clubs that have entirely shaped my experience here at Bonaventure.
This semester, I am reflecting on something else as well: quite possibly the thing I will treasure the most for the rest of my life. My most prized possessions.
If you had the ability to view my life from when I was just a baby until now, you would see that I spent a good chunk of that time posing for pictures and staring into a camera lens.
My mom was always a picture person, even if it was the most mundane of things. When I was in middle school especially, this was THE MOST annoying thing that probably could have ever happened (I tried to capture my best middle school attitude there).
Though I knew I had taken or been in hundreds, maybe even thousands, of photos throughout my lifetime, I never knew that they were all going to be compiled to tell the story of my life.
During my senior year, my mom decided that she was going to take almost every picture of me from birth until senior year and add them to photo albums to share at my graduation party.
This was a huge undertaking and I remember during my senior year seeing my mom work tirelessly at the kitchen table night after night to finish it in time.
When the last picture was placed and the scrapbook paper was slid into its cover sheet, I told my mom I loved them and wanted to look through them all consecutively right then and there. I think she was so excited to be done that she didn’t have the energy to fight me and just let me have at it.
I will never forget the feeling of looking at photos of myself in my Pa’s arms as a baby with an alarmingly tomato-red face, all the way to me on my friend Bailey’s dad’s shoulders throwing my grad cap in the air.
To this day, if I start to feel any sort of strong emotion, which is frequently, I will pull out one of the books and start getting lost in the memories.
I believe that a picture really is worth a thousand words and if that’s true, I could never express what a thousand pictures mean to me. So, thank you, Mom, for the most kind-hearted thing anything has ever done for me. I will treasure them forever and always.