The Originals

A couple of years ago I had a mishap with water. It splashed out of an

overflowing tub upstairs, soaked through the floor and ran down to the

basement where I had my prized photographs stored. Ruined, hundreds

of photos taken over many years were welded together into brick-like

blocks when the box and its contents had dried. (I had not discovered the

calamity until several weeks had already passed.)

For the past few weeks now I have been pouring over copies of some of
the ruined images which I had duplicated into book form previously. 
Copies are copies and are noticeably weaker and grainy when compared
to the originals. So, with the aid of a good photo-shop program on my
computer I have been trying to recreate some of the photos I had lost in
that flood of destruction.

I look at the results of my hard work and consider them acceptable. These

reconstructions, however, will never replace the originals. In a sense those

originals were an historic record, a visual family of memories to me. And

I have suffered from the loss.

Life is impermanent, unfeeling and cruel sometimes. For now, these some-

what flawed rebuilt images will have to do. Really though, you should have

been there to see the originals, not the photographs, mind you, but the real

live originals, the ones-of-a-kind flesh and blood people I saw as worthy of

snapping the camera shutter in the first place. Unfortunately, many of them

too have been washed away by the tidal wave of time.

Chris Hanch  9-5-15