Hard to Throw Away

For over a year now, I have been clearing out my house in preparation for my move to Mexico.  I had a garage sale last year (too much work for so little money).  I have taken bags of clothing and household items to Goodwill.  I have received some cash for old coins and unused jewelry.  Small but treasured items have been packed into my suitcases each time I travel to Mexico.  A lot of stuff simply goes out into the trash.  Since my return from my last trip, I have been emptying more drawers, cabinets, and closets.  But on the shelf of my bedroom closet, there is something that must be thrown away, but I hate to do so.  There are a dozen large notebooks filled with slides from years of travel.  The slides are placed in plastic sleeves.  There are also boxes and even old carousel trays filled with slides.  When I retired, one of my goals was to get all of them all sorted and put into more notebooks.  I made a start on that but never finished.

I first started taking slides in 1973 when I made my first trip out of the country... three months spent in Mexico studying at the University of the Americas.  I had a Kodak Instamatic camera back then.  Eventually I upgraded to a 35 mm camera.  My former students can all attest to the many slides of travels to Mexico, Peru, Argentina and other countries which I showed them.  Dinosaur that I am, I still clung stubbornly to film photography after retirement, even though it was getting harder and harder to find someplace that would develop my film.  After the death of my partner in 2011, I joined the 21st century and started using his digital camera.  Now I am a dinosaur again, and some people are surprised that I take photos with a camera rather than with a smartphone.  

I know that I could convert my slides to digital format and store them on my computer.  In fact, I have an apparatus that does that.  I wrote a number of posts on this blog which featured photos from those long-ago travels.  However, I have thousands upon thousands of slides, and uploading them all to the computer would be incredibly time-consuming.  Even those slides which were protected in the plastic sleeves are showing their age.  It would take even more time photo-shopping them to make them look good again.  Every time I look at those notebooks, I think, "I have to throw those out," but, so far, I have not had the heart to do so. 

Fortunately, I have twelve years of digital slide shows from my travels stored on DVDs.  (Hopefully, DVD players will not go completely obsolete within my remaining years!)  Those discs, more than fifty of them, are already packed into a box that will be shipped to Mexico by the moving company when I make the final move.