Our kids gave us a lot of work to do and called it a gift. It felt like a mandate.
They gave us a slide converter to change our 45 trays of slides into digital format.
The trays hold up to 100 slides. The slides must be individually loaded into the machine and saved to a chip. Definitely not a task for the fainthearted.
I set up the machine, pulled a couple boxes of slides out of the cupboard, scanned all the slides and afterward saw the spots and big insects on the pictures caused by bits of lint and dust.
Ohhhh, that’s why my son loaned me his air compressor – to blow dirt off the slides.
I did not want to have to re-do those slides.
Time for Project Man! He zoomed in with his super powers for details and obsessive ability to see a task through to the end. I pointed at the troubling slides and he advanced to conquer the task.
I helped. I arranged the slides on a light box and returned them to the trays (tossing away slides of the unknown and blurry).
We converted reel after reel, recalled our family reunions, watched our children, nieces and nephews grow from infants to parents, revisited national and state parks and stood still long enough in Disneyland to pose with Goofy.
We discovered the first slides we photographed together on the shores of Lake Michigan. That day 40 years ago, Project Man showed me how to use a SLR (single lens reflex) camera to take pictures of the waves crashing against the shore.
He says he taught me everything he knew in five minutes and I clicked off better pictures of the waves than he did. From then on, we shared camera duties, snapping endless miles of scenery and asking folks to stand still long enough for our many slides of family groups and individuals.
Looking back, we are astounded at who we used to be and how young we looked.
Like many couples we started out with little other than our youthful strength and determination to make a go of it with the income he earned to support himself, me and our ready-made family of two sons that quickly grew into five sons and a daughter. Two-thirds of the way through the project, we found the original pictures of our first home.
I can not believe how bad it looked inside and out. The paint and wallpaper had peeled everywhere. Disintegrating plaster left a huge hole in a kitchen wall and the floors sagged from a hundred years of use. Before we moved in one wintery day, we installed a real hot water heater to replace the tank connected to the furnace and we had a line laid to the city sewer system – leaving us with a muddy back yard for the winter.
My mother designed a bulletin board to cover up the hole in the kitchen. We scrubbed everything as thoroughly as we could including the ancient bathroom – which looked 10 years past the point of being condemned. We used it until we saved enough funds to completely re-do it.
Shoving his chair back from those slides, Project Man said, “I can not imagine what your parents thought about us. Here you were marrying this much older man with two children and I bought that house for you to live in. As a father, I know how I would have felt.”
I agreed with him but also pointed out that they gave him a chance and he proved himself worthy of their trust as seen in the pictures taken 10 years. By that time, unafraid of hard work, he had replaced or re-painted every surface in the house, from the basement to the roof and yard. Eventually a new job dictated we pack up our slides and replace the entire house.
We bought a brand new suburban house with a dirt yard for Project Man’s attention.
In the spring yard work will return, meanwhile the slide project has kept us busy while enjoying a trip down memory lane.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.)