I’ve been thinking about time, and markers that show me time passing. For example, when my child gets to a certain stage in school and is doing the same things I remember doing, but doing them differently, I see technology as a marker of time. I made posters. This generation makes PowerPoint presentations.

Another marker just struck me. I have no engagement photos. Not one. Smartphones hadn’t been invented yet. Our engagement was a purely private event. I have many “photos” of it in my heart, but there was no one there to document it for us. Thinking about it, this makes me glad.

There’s something about photographs. I love them in many ways, but sometimes I find they step in and replace memories. The memory is intangible. It floats around inside you, bumping into other memories, feelings, passing time. It’s powerful and fragile. It’s so easy to look at a photo again and again, until you remember the photo, the way the event looked from the outside, instead of what you saw from the inside, living through it.

Memories can fade. A photograph can be more permanent. But it will also, always, be incomplete. A photograph could never document that I remember walking inches above the ground in the golden rain falling outside the cathedral where he asked for my heart and hand.