How Can Ten Years Go By So Fast...?

 Got another "Memories" on social media today. It's strange that they're selecting things I once posted that are now more than a decade old.

How can ten years go by so fast?

I suppose that's a sign of getting older. It still blows my mind that it was only ten years after my father passed away, I graduated from high school. I lived a whole lifetime in those ten years. From eight to eighteen, it was way more than just a decade of time. 

Ten years ago, we lived in Farmington, Utah. And on March 11, 2012, our family visited the Farmington City Library where my daughter sat on the floor and picked out a book. While she was checking it out, I snapped a picture--probably used a Kodak digital camera which I took with me everywhere back then.

It's ten years later. My daughter is driving home from seeing a play in which she helped choreograph. She's earned one degree. She's a young woman making decisions that will affect the rest of her life. The building in which I took the photo is gone...bulldozed and is now a parking lot. I wonder if the book still exists. We'll probably never know what book it was so there's no way to know if it's still part of the Davis County Library system.

We now live two counties over in a place I never imagined myself living. We no longer "check out" books at the library...we download them and read them on a screen. No more sitting on the floor, no more discovering the wonder of touching a physical object that someone wrote and someone else published.

A decade has passed since that winter evening. So much has changed. I can't believe it's flown by so fast. 

When A Picture Brings Back All The Memories...

I'm not the most active social networker, but I do post things every day. Sometimes, it's only two things--a Pic Of The Day, and a blog post--and that's usually it. But, when you've posted these things every day for almost a decade, you have a huge photo library saved on certain websites.

This morning, the above picture popped into my Facebook feed. 

And all the memories came rushing in.

I love this photo, mostly because it's a picture of my two youngest sons, sitting in the same chair, reading a book. Flash forward ten years from that day, my youngest is our only kid in school (other than college...), the older of the two is self-employed as a graphic artist. I don't know about the book or the chair, but I know the building where this picture was taken is long gone. There's a new library a few blocks over, but it's not the same library where I went and checked out books, where I went to make copies (basically, the only place in town to make copies...), where I went to study and to research and to find and read the Lord of the Rings and other amazing books.

We all know we can never go back. We can never return to the lives we knew, nor can we be the people we once were. There's wisdom in that, but the wisdom comes at a price. The price is memories.