Somewhere in America, beneath a mound of primary color construction paper, family photos, scissors, and glitter stickers, you’ll find a group of women preserving their family memories into nicely bound scrapbooks. They call themselves “croppers” and they believe the road to scrapbook heaven is paved with acid-free tape.
A few years ago, I attended my first cropping party. I had a dirty little secret—in my closet sat three boxes of photos that had never been placed in a scrapbook or photo album. I felt compelled to share this with my newfound friends.
“Hi, I’m Amy and I’m a non-cropper. I realized I had a problem when my son asked me if modern photography was available when he was a baby. There was also the time my husband found me discarding undeveloped rolls of film into the trashcan. If I didn’t develop it, I didn’t have to face it. Others tried to help me, some even intervened. One friend got in my face, screaming, ‘You’ve got to get your photos together, missy! Do it for the children. Do it for yourself.’ So this is what led me here tonight.”
The silence was deafening before a cropper spoke.
“You’ve taken a big step just by being here,” she said, “Remember, we just take one page at a time.”
“Done is better than perfect, dear,” another cropper chimed in.
Easy for them to say. My challenge was greater. Decades of photos, birthday invitations, school certificates, letters, and artwork were rendering guilt upon my cropless soul. Maybe it was best to put all my keepsakes into one big album. My fellow croppers deemed this approach unacceptable.
“That is tacky, dear, “she said, “You might as well buy some store-bought photo albums if you’re going to be cavalier about it.”
I began to dream about my perfect scrapbook. It would sit beside the fireplace and our entire family would read and revisit it together through the years. This would be the album the kids would fight over as adults.
“Hey! Why do you get the first family scrapbook?” my son would ask.
‘Well, you got the house, the car, and the trust fund, so it’s only fair I get our beloved scrapbook!” my daughter would reply.
It was at this point that I had my first epiphany. Scrapbooking should be a celebration of legacy. This released me somehow. So, my scrapbook’s first page was a love letter to my children. Ever since, each scrapbook has a letter on its first page alternately written by my husband and me.
The other day, I was looking for something in our closet and another box of photos spilled out onto the floor. I’m behind again—two years of stuff to be exact. This is when Epiphany Number Two occurred. I’m done with cropping—at least for now.
I went to the store and bought three photo albums at $9.99 each. It isn’t perfect, but it’ll do.
In the end, I suspect my family and I will enjoy both the beautifully created scrapbooks and the store-bought versions. Both will capture the days in our lives, the awe in our moments. In the end, it will be the keepsakes that will tell our story. It will be the photos that will say we were here once—we lived, we loved, we laughed, and, on occasion, we cropped.
Done is better than perfect.