I almost left the slides behind

I didn’t know why I loved lupins so much until I opened the link and saw my grandad in his back yard. There they were. The orange and yellow flowers I remember in his tiny strip of garden behind his terraced home in Portsmouth, England. I could immediately smell the sawdust in his workshop at the end of the garden and see the beautiful inlaid chessboard he made there for my father.

The link was from a guy in Oregon who had digitized some of the hundreds of 35 mm slides I brought home from England after Dad moved from the home he’d lived in for 40 years to a nursing facility. Emptying your family home is a sobering experience, one that makes you promise to make it easy for your own kids.

After countless trips to the charity store with donations and the transfer station to recycle, there were all the things that had to hit the dumpster. I hesitated over the boxes of slides. I mean, who has a slide projector these days? Maybe they could be digitized? I put them in the ‘keep’ pile and crammed them into my suitcase.

I tried doing it myself with a little machine bought from one of those catalogs that sells you things you never knew you needed. But it was tedious and the onscreen image quality was poor, so the boxes languished for a couple of years. Then I found a guy online who promised good results at a reasonable cost. He had good reviews so I sent him a batch.

The results took my breath away. There on my screen was my childhood. My parents suddenly young. Me and my brother playing, on vacations, growing up.

And there was Grandad with his lupins. Now I knew why they always made me feel nostalgic. On visits to Maine I loved finding them growing in wild blue waves by the roadside. I tried growing them in my garden but, unfortunately, the deer liked them as much as I do.

I sent the rest of the slides to Oregon, and am so glad they came home with me. I planted lupins again this year.