
My husband received a little machine for Christmas to convert slides to digital format. After all, he is the one who has been complaining about the stack of carousel boxes in the closet. (Okay, they were on his side, so he had a right.) He has set a goal of fifty slides a night. My job is to peruse them and tell him what he doesn’t need to bother with, and then to label and organize the digital files into albums in my computer. My face-recognition software sometimes confuses my children with my grandchildren or me with one of my daughters. I guess there must be a family resemblance.

Here is a picture of the international school my girls attended in Mozambique where a little boy used to chase Erika around the playground trying to get her to kiss him. The last day of school Katie moaned about how long it would be before she would see her Libyan friend. (That was the year the U.S. bombed Libya for terrorist involvement.)
Here is the converted American drug pusher who was released on parole to our custody a couple weeks before Erika was born. And here is Queila, the pastor’s daughter who lived with us to go to school, pushing the stroller.


Next week I’ll be in Indiana helping my father to sort through his stash of slides—many of them my own history. I wonder what new things I will learn about myself.