Short Story

Boxful Of Memories

Nancy's Notes 🖊️🎶

Written for Esther’s Writing Prompts #50
where the prompt word is “photographs”.
This is my family’s true story.

When I was growing up, my mother kept all our family photos in albums. Picture-taking back then was an event, a major production, and all the photos were lovingly saved in albums to be admired. So it came as quite a shock to me when I started dating my now husband to discover that his mother kept their beloved family photos in cardboard boxes! And they weren’t organized, either ….. they were simply tossed in. When the family felt like passing the time looking through old photos, down came the boxes from the closet shelf and the fun would begin.

It really was fun ….. a family happening. We’d all sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and going through boxes of photographs. We’d stick our hand in a box and pull out a photo; we had no idea which one we’d come out with since they were all mixed together. There’s a story behind each photo, often funny, sometimes sentimental or sad. But it was always an adventure.

When Bill and I got married and started collecting our own photos, I decided to follow his family tradition of keeping the photos in boxes. Yes, we have our beautiful wedding album and endless volumes of photo books of the grandkids which are lovely to look at but predictable. Now we sit around our kitchen table with our sons, daughters-in-law and grandkids, and sometimes, instead of playing cards or a board game, we’ll pour over boxes of photos, reminiscing, telling stories and laughing like crazy.

And really, when you think about it, isn’t having a great time with the ones you love more important than just about anything? Yeah, I thought you’d agree.

NAR©2025

This is “Every Picture Tells A Story” by Rod Stewart

Writing Prompts

All text, graphics and videos are copyright for Nancy ~ The Sicilian Storyteller, Nancy (The Sicilian Storyteller), The Sicilian Storyteller, The Elephant’s Trunk, and The Rhythm Section, and are not to be used without permission. NAR©2017-present.

33 thoughts on “Boxful Of Memories”

  2. I love this idea! I don’t have many photos anymore unfortunately but if I had some printed, I would do this besides an album! It’s so nice to have boxes of sweet memories! 😊

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  4. My dad took loads of photographs, and while a few ended up framed and hung on the wall, most ended up stored in cardboard boxes. Unfortunately, the boxes were kept on shelves in the basement, and were lost in a flood in 1972. The photographs that had been framed and hung on the wall are the only ones that survived. I have a few of them and my two surviving siblings have the others.

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  8. I like that method! We had precious few photos growing up, the film was just too expensive, and I am glad for the handful of school photos mom saved. She stuffed photos, willy nilly, in any old album she could find, including the sticky one, random shots from different years. The few I have are treasurers.

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  9. My mother kept tidy albums. But, she did give me a box of family photos that like yours, were random. Some of these folks are strangers to me, but a few bring back vivid memories from my childhood. My two uncles, my mothers brothers, are the cads that turned me into a fiction warped liar, as my mother said. They had a story or tall tale for everything, and as I grew, it was clear that is was all BS. I have them and my aunt to thank for my incurable affliction.

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  12. Reading this post reminded me that I had promised to share pictures of my cousin who passed away a few weeks ago with her sister and daughter. I had a good time looking through all the old photos.

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