Life passes.
We change our house, our job. We cut our hair shorter and then even shorter.
We renew the wardrobe, we move house again. Photographs are timeless!
There is no expiration date on the good times, the bonds and the affections when we register them. We can keep them forever. Sharp and colorful even when threatened by the haze of oblivion.
A few days ago I have been with my grandmother.
Years passed for her. She said goodbye to so many people she loved, to all the places where she lived.
In the wallet, although worn and more or less yellowed, she brings the whole family in photographs.
Each one a story to tell and always the same war in the bet if a photo is from my grandmother or from her sister... and even if another picture is me when I was (even more) smaller or my mother.
These images, these stories and these moments in which we remember other past moments or people that still exist in us, although they have long departed, are only possible because they are forever on a piece of paper, aged and washed out, but allowing such clear and still so alive memories. Opening my grandmother's wallet is entering a real time machine!
Will it be that, many years from now, Madalena, who we have met with just a few days of life, who we have photographed again a couple of times more and who is now waiting for the arrival of her younger brother, would forget these moments when she went and we were so happy?
Of course not! Because the photographs will stay with her and with us forever.
Because this is the best legacy we can leave her, and perhaps the best we can take with us wherever we go: memories!
No matter how much time passes by and that the memory loses the north of the details with which we counted the days, we will always have the photographs to tell the story of the families, of the love, of the ties, of an afternoon of sun or of the bluest sky we can ever remember.
... And also the story of a happy family at the edge of a pond, to where the two dogs decided to jump with the four legs together, to try their luck with the ducks that were swimming around!
Forever, with us and now with you too, the memories of an incredible afternoon at the Lagoa Azul (Blue Lagoon):
