I live for stories. Love them. Love to hear snippets of people’s lives told over hot coffee or cold beers on the beach. I love to read a great story, like the novel I read this week on vacation. (The Help, by the way, and I highly recommend it!) I love to listen to stories about people’s grandfathers, or of their college antics, or of middle school angst. I love stories in sermons and stories in songs. I love how stories bring the themes of love, suffering and redemption to life. Stories, whether past memories or future dreams, bring life to LIFE.

So you’d think I’d be better at cataloging my own memories. I spend a lot of time in my head and being in other people’s heads, because I love it. But that means I’m often caught without a camera, and that even when I take pictures, I’m terrible at downloading them, even worse at printing them, and a complete failure at creating frames, scrapbooks or other memory paraphernalia for my kids.

One of my college roommates disagrees. She thinks I have a great memory for stories, and when I think about my days with her, I do think of lots of snapshot memories: her Laura Ashley pink and green flowered bedspread, the hours we’d spend watching Talk Soup on E, our long runs around campus, the way she wrote her name on the top of her notebook. I can remember inside jokes between her and our other roommates, things that make no sense to anyone else. But most of the big details are a bit fuzzy.

I think that’s how I see life, in the snapshots of memories that hard-bake into my memory like pottery, turning strong and shiny and durable. So in the spirit of little memories and the stories they tell, I thought I’d share a few from our vacation this week:

1. playing a game of “Family” with eight children under seven, which turned to complete mayhem that was so loud, we couldn’t have heard a roaring lion even if it was in the room with us.

2. a piggyback ride race that involved my hubs carrying another hubs, both of whom tried too hard to win and immediately planted face-first into the sand.

3. the taste of fresh-caught shrimp, prepared and peeled and served, all without me doing a thing. Delicious on so many levels.

4. the moment when walking through the sand and realizing that “sugar sand” is a completely accurate descriptor for such a gorgeously fine substance beneath my toes.

5. the look on my two sons’ faces as they attempted to ride a boogy board together, the toddlers chubby cheeks next to his brother’s tanned face that already has begun to show clues of the man he is becoming.

6. shared looks of understanding and compassion between the three moms, trying to raise good kids while staying sane.

7. Realizing that there is more love and more tension in every marriage than I think most of us ever let on. Going away together for a week is a good way to see the reality of marriages, that they take a lot of work but they are infinitely worth it.

8. The blessing of a break from daily routine, which actually makes me grateful for the daily routine.

So how do you remember things? Are you more prone to the snapshots or do you remember every detail? What’s your favorite snapshot memory?