John and I have been back from our European adventure for four days now. On our first night back, we devoured a dinner of steak and fresh broccoli, red meat and green vegetables seeming to be one of the few food cravings we could not satisfy in Spain or France. We’ve gotten our bodies re-acclimated to operating on the correct time zone (i.e. we’re falling asleep at night and actually waking up in the morning), and we’ve paid those bills that we knew would come due within days of our return (thanks to Outlook alarms).

We also made time to sort through our snapshots and post them on online galleries in order to share them with our friends. This was a magical process in itself.

I remember when I was a kid, how after a vacation we would drop off rolls of film from our Instamatic at our local Walgreen’s where they would send them out to a processor for development. It would take about a week before we could actually see any glossies. Perhaps weeks later, we would invite relatives or friends over for dinner to see our vacation book; a padded vinyl-covered album that contained our photos. Because of development costs, we didn’t take more photos than what we thought would turn out. We pretty much put every image we took in “the book.”

John and I probably took hundreds of photos in our 18 days abroad and yet, it didn’t feel like our intention to build an image library for memories interfered with our being present to what we were experiencing in any moment. We had fun when we would retreat to our hotel for the evening and download images from the last day or two onto his laptop. We deleted a few pics during these reviews but saved the task of serious editing for our return. Yesterday, we posted separate collections from each place we visited to run as slide shows on Kodak’s site.

There were three stages to this activity, each, involving the mind and heart, contained their own special pleasures.

First, we went through a selection process. Fortunately, John and I agreed on most choices. We wanted to have some tourist shots, some record of our visits to important attractions, but we mostly took street shots. When compiling our collection, we looked for shots that captured what we were feeling where the shot was taken, or we looked for something that conveyed a sense of uniqueness about a place. We tried to choose pictures that conveyed what it was like to find a UPS truck in Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella (Old City) or see our reflection in a bookstore window on Paris’ left bank. We wanted to include shots that represented other places like it, a sort of best of approach, and avoid just putting out everything we took. We wanted to choose the best five, not twenty-five, pictures of the hanging hams in Spain’s delicatessens and tapas bars and the most Parisian looking images of sidewalk café chairs arranged for people-watching.

Then we went on to the task of captioning and, cum cartoonists for the New Yorker, had fun trying to compose wry observations for some of our pictures. We included small notes on location so that we could remember where we saw something, but most of our verbiage reflected our personal sense of humor. For a photo of two waiters smoking on break just outside an upscale Paris café, we added the comment, “At these prices they should be working.” For a picture of me in a garden copping the pose of a nearby sculpture of a nude woman, hands clasped seductively behind her head, back arched, we wrote, “Statue imitating Deb.”

The last stage of creating our online image albums was re-living. We must have viewed each shot several times, individually and then as part of a slideshow, before we decided to share the Kodak link with our friends. Each image seemed to tap into a well of experiences. When we remembered each place, we remembered how we felt at the time. We recalled whether we arrived somewhere on foot or by Metro, if we were hungry or whether we snagged a croissant or crepe on the way, if we got lost that morning or if we felt in flow, if we thought something was funny, how the air smelled, and sometimes we actually seemed to hear whatever music might have been playing when we were in a scene. We delighted in each private slideshow. After all, although we wanted to share our pictures, the process of creating roadmaps to our best memories, we understood, is really for us.

Using images to trigger a felt experience and actually re-live that moment is no small thing.