A package arrived in the mail last week filled with unexpected bounty: photos that I was sure had gone on vacation permanently 25 years ago were returned to me by a family member. 

Opening the package was like a trip to my favorite coffee shop (no hyperbole in these times; coffee shops are a sorely missed ritual). Going through the stack of familiar family faces with a willing friend brought out the stories: mother, father, brother, grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins. And the occasional, “Who the hell IS that?” I’d missed those images almost as much as I miss the family members, most gone now.

The snapshot is one of my life pleasures. I don’t mean taking them myself, although I’ve played family documentarian at an event or two. I like looking at them, and I don’t discriminate between my family snapshots and those of other families. I have a small hinged Dutch Delites cigar box filled with family snapshots not my own, and I occasionally flip through them making up stories about the subjects of the photos while I sip a cup of tea. Maribeth, who married Sam in 1942, and the car her neighbor loaned them so they could have a wedding photo in front of a vehicle and look like a couple with a future. This one of Dezi on a pony taken right before the accident when he lost a finger but lived.

Digital photos have a similar draw. I like to flip through random photos in my camera roll and I love posting “the last photo with the color blue in your camera roll.” But when it came to documenting my second Camino, I wanted a daily practice that didn’t rely on my phone’s battery life. I wanted an art practice that would make me stop and look, and see. I stopped and looked while I lived in Spain between Caminos. Look, see, laugh. A practice.

I did take photos while I lived in Madrid and some in Pamplona as well, but by the end of my two years on the Iberian Peninsula I had become less absorbed in the practice of taking photos of what I saw and more in the practice of living.

In the short months before I walked my second Camino with my son Erik, I was two years back in the Pacific Northwest and looking for a practice once again that would make me look and see and feel. I wanted to record experiences with my hands and not just my eyes. If you’ve read my previous post, Finding a Practice on the Camino, you know how that turned out. I never did create or send a watercolor postcard to a single soul. Instead, I reverted to my digital photos practice and posted on Instagram (@lhcole613) daily for the 40 days I walked across Spain.

My imagined 1:1 watercolor postcard practice became a mass communication practice, and I connected with many people rather than one person at a time. My Instagram posts came from the images of what pleased me most in our days and if I’m honest, the feedback and responses I received probably nurtured my creativity as much as a watercolor practice ever could.

One day near the end of the Camino, when I was probably looking for some photos to snap in a quiet village on my way to Muxia, I ran into an Italian couple whose “Way” merged with mine at the end of their Camino Portugues. We wandered the town together, bumbling through with their poor English and my non-existent Italian (note to self) and agreed to meet later to find dinner, a prospect that didn’t look promising.

We walked into the only bar in town, or at least the only open bar. My Spanish being marginally better than the Italians’, I asked the small, older woman behind the bar and with an air of proprietor about getting dinner. She nodded and said, “Claro.” Of course.

The three of us didn’t have much hope for the meal. The room was empty except for a couple of men sitting at the bar drinking beer, maybe relatives of the bartender. We might have joked about the meal we expected to be served: Greasy julienned potatoes and a flattened piece of meat.

“Would it be all right,” the proprietor and cook began in Spanish, “if I made you some pork chops, salad, and potatoes? And red wine and water, of course.” Yes, yes. We were hungry after the day’s walk, and we weren’t asking many questions.

What followed was one of the most memorable pilgrim meals I’ve ever eaten, and though I’m not a foodie, that meal was deserving of the snapshot I never took. She brought us a plate of pork so moist and tender it was as though she’d kept the live pig behind the bar until we arrived, a salad with plums so sweet and delicious that we were overly polite about who should get the last helping, and a never-ending plate of potatoes neither greasy nor tasteless. I think about that meal often, even though the specifics are fading in my memory and I don’t have a photo.

What happens when I can no longer remember that meal? Does it matter? Is a memory less of a memory because I didn’t record it? Will I carry a camera on my next Camino? What does it mean to record a journey with your eyes, your memory, your stories?

Do you have memories with no photographs attached to them or are photographs necessary to help you create memory? I can’t quite imagine never making a single image, never recording the sounds I encounter or the voices of the people I meet. I’m still trying to decide whether to carry electronics on my Shrewsbury to Rome pilgrimage.