In February I got a $50 gift card for a service that puts photos on a CD. I will use it to digitize hundreds of our old pictures.

In the forty-five years that Peter and I have known each other, we have filled album after album. Deciding which ones to digitize, which to keep just-in-case and which to toss turns out to be both more emotional and more of a time-sink than I anticipated.

We know that our kids won't want all the pictures of random people we met on twenty years of bicycling vacations. We have forgotten most of their names anyway. And how many pictures of the kids sledding do we keep for posterity?

I have been working on my picture project on and off for two months. It's become a burden. It's not the time and effort that's getting to me. It's the realization that the best is behind us. Our wedding, our honeymoon, the kids just born, the kids in school plays, the kids graduating from high school, college, and graduate school.

They may be just fading photos, but they are the story of our life together.

And it's gone way too fast.