Red Rubber Boots

I awoke at 3:30 this morning thinking about a pair of red rubber boots I owned in the 1970s.

I’d like to believe I bought them for their dazzling appearance, but that’s only speculation. What I know is, they followed me faithfully through a series of moves before disappearing, in 1979, in the midst of another. I’d relocated to Missoula, Montana, that summer, and when I returned to Oregon in the fall the boots—plus a few other items—stayed behind, lost in the disorganized contents of a friend’s basement apartment. There were a lot of boxes down there, and I missed that one.

When the boots popped into mind today they were joined by another of the misplaced articles—a carton containing photos I’d taken since 1971, the year I bought my first camera. Not all of those pictures, fortunately, just enough that I longed looked for them for a couple of years before accepting that they were gone, even as the memories they’d cue faded. Time screws a dirty skylight filter over long-ago events, and without associated pictures those recollections shift as easily as quicksand.

This is an effect that intensifies as you get older.

The reappearance of the boots is well-timed, however, because I’ve set up my light box on a table here in the office and will soon commence work on The Last Edit. Now, I know it won’t be the last—I’m not that naïve—but it has to come close, because the file cabinet is stuffed with plastic slide pages and boxes and something has to give. If I continue to ignore them these images will end up like the photos I lost in ‘79—out of sight, and eventually out of mind.

At least the digital images on my hard drives contain embedded EXIF data; information (if any) on the slide mounts is cursory—maybe, if I’m lucky, the date and subject, but nothing more. And to begin organizing the pictures I must rely on file folder labels, which hopefully are still accurate. “I know they’re here somewhere.“

While I’m doing the analog editing I’m also going to swing my chair around and dabble with the digital side—feeding off the energy of one to provide impetus for the other. Hard drives fill as surely as any file drawer, so here’s a chance to gain breathing room there, too.

Autumn-into-December is a prime time for all of this—the shorter, darker, rainy days will be perfect for sorting, while at night I can listen to raindrops pepper the roof and perhaps dream of something besides red rubber boots.