for the first twelve or so years of my childhood, my parents had multiple photo albums, all filled up with memories and milestones collected over the years. books filled with baby pictures, birthdays, summer vacations, and the family dog lined the shelves of a big entertainment centre that stood in our living room. i didn’t flip through the books as often as i should have, because it felt like life would always be like that. like i’d always have books of memories lining my shelves. i never would have imagined that someday so much of our lives would turn digital. but as the years passed, the cameras that captured the memories cycled, and the gaps between having photos printed stretched longer and longer.
then one day, the photos stopped being held in books on the shelf, and started being held in little folders on a computer screen. “we’ll have to get those printed soon”. but soon never came, and before anyone really realized, our memories had become digitized. not because anyone chose it, but because life chose for us. technology moved on, everything became digital, and it feels like second nature for your memories to live in your camera roll instead of on your shelf.
now, i almost never get photos printed. my phone camera roll and icloud backup serve as the keeper of all my memories. about 8 months after our wedding i finally got a handful of those photos printed, and they were the first personal photos to make their way onto our shelves. what i’ve realized is that keeping physical memories is kind of a lost art. a lot of us are looking back through the years and the only evidence of the life lived is held in a camera roll next to a slew of random screenshots or saved recipes.
but having physical memories is a gift. there is something so special—so magical—about opening up an old photo album and seeing the faces of loved ones smiling back at you. it’s so much easier to really cherish a memory when you can hold it in your hands, compared to when its tucked between thousands of other photos staring back at you through a screen. it’s something i always admire about most of the older generations homes. the shelves are full of pictures spanning decades, with little knick knacks and mementos from trips or events littered throughout. i think of my grandparents house, and i could spend hours looking at the photos of my parents, aunts, and uncles throughout different points in their lives. and photos just the start of how to keep your memories physically. there are so many ways to ensure you have memories that exist outside of your camera roll.
the first one of course, is to take more photos. i am a pictures girl through and through, even if many of them never make their way out of my camera roll. i am so thankful to have years worth of photos of friends, family, big moments and small to look back on. but not everyone thinks to take photos. my husband for example, has had the same friend group for years(over a decade), and they can probably count on one hand the amount of photos they have together (they’re working on it). as much as you may feel like you’ll remember something forever, you won’t. so take the pictures. it only takes a second, and you get to look back on them year after year.
something i’m trying to introduce is taking real photos. not just ones on my iphone, but with a camera. ideally film, or disposables. cameras where you can’t fuss over how you look and if the picture is perfect. you take the shot, and you move on. because as important as those memories are, documenting shouldn’t interfere with living in the moment.
there’s something a real camera gives you that your phone doesn’t: distance. (and better depth, when comparing phone to camera photos). with film, you don’t get to see the photo right away. you don’t get to retake it, filter it, or delete it if you blinked wrong. you just take it, trust it, and wait and see. it makes picture-taking into something closer to memory itself: a little blurry, a little imperfect, but honest about what the moment really looked like.
and because film or disposable cameras cost money, and only hold so many shots, it changes what you choose to capture. you stop taking twelve versions of the same photo hoping one turns out perfect, and you start taking the one photo that matters—the warmth of the beach, the laugh mid-sentence, the messy kitchen table, the friend you haven’t seen in years. the limitation forces you to be more intentional, which, funny enough, is what makes the photos worth keeping in the first place.
taking the photos is only one half of the pie, though. you need to actually print them off, even if its just having some iphone photos printed and put in an album. i miss the days where my memories were stored in books i could pull out and revisit at any time—not buried in a camera roll, thousands of photos deep, that i have to scroll through just to find the one i’m looking for.
i have been trying to be better about printing photos often enough that i am not overwhelmed by sorting through what is worth printing and what to pass on. ideally every month or two (some months hold more memories than others), go through your photos or take your disposables and film to be developed. doing it in smaller batches makes it manageable. i like making it a little activity of its own, picking up my photos, and then coming home, lighting a candle and placing them in my album, writing little captions or notes on the back.
there’s a feeling that comes with flipping through an actual photo album that a phone screen could never ever replicate or replace, so let it be something you get to do a lot more often.
journaling is another great way to keep your memories, because again you may think you’ll remember your most amazing days, but you won’t fully. you’ll remember the big things, but the little details may eventually be lost to time. i think of our elopement—i didn’t journal that day because i was just living in the moment and not really thinking about it. i was so present that day, and i replayed the whole day in my mind over and over. i thought i’d never forget a thing. but there are details i already can’t remember, and it hasn’t even been quite a year yet. what did we talk about first thing in the morning before our wedding? did we go down to grab our cake from the innkeeper before breakfast or after? there are small details that aren’t necessarily “important” that i wish i could remember. i wish i wrote it all down, it wouldn’t have taken long to jot it all down in a notebook or phone note to put in a journal later on. a few minutes before bed and i could have some more details to my favourite day after.
i also think of the journals and diaries from people of the past—both iconic historical figures, and just regular average joes. how cool is it to be able to look back in someones diary and see what a boring day of life was like in 1954? or 1920? or 2008? imagine being able to revisit your life, your day to day, in your own words 10, 20, 50 years after it happened. thats a gift only you can give yourself. so write the journal, even if it seems boring and you don’t know quite how to start. it’ll feel more natural with time.
if you’ve read boring things for a little while now, you know i am big into comfort media. i mark time and seasons through the books and movies i consume. i’ll forever be in awe of how so much can change, yet when i put the same movie on during a cool autumn night, i feel the same way i did the first time i watched it. my heart swells with nostalgia and love for the media that holds every version of me.
having seasonal media is so grounding. it’s what makes autumn feel like autumn, or summer feel like summer. the cozy feelings stay constant even while everything else moves. the movie doesn’t change, so when you press play, it becomes a kind of measuring stick. you can feel exactly how much you have changed against the one thing that hasn’t.
i think that’s part of why comfort media hits so much harder with repetition. the first time you watch or read something, you’re just experiencing the story. but every time after that, you’re experiencing the story and every past season you lived that cemented it as a comfort. by the tenth autumn rewatch, you’re not just watching a movie—you’re sitting beside eight year old you, eighteen-year-old you, twenty-two-year-old you, and last year’s you, all curled up on the same couch, watching the same scenes hit the same way they always have.
don’t overcomplicate it. it can be as simple as always rereading the same book every winter, or always putting on the same christmas movie the day you put up the tree, or saving one specific show for rainy spring afternoons. the media becomes a seasonal marker the same way a scent or a song can, you don’t even have to try to remember what autumn feels like, because the movie already remembers it for you, and hands the feeling back to you the moment you press play.
have seasonal scents. trust me. perfumes you return to summer after summer, or a pumpkin candle you light every fall, the same sunscreen you’ve repurchased over and over, a fragrance you save just for one moment. my husband and i each picked out wedding perfumes, and haven’t worn them since. we’re already looking forward to pulling them out on our anniversary, just for that one day. i remember after our wedding, i couldn’t bring myself to wash his shirt for over a week—our perfumes were still mingling faintly in the fabric, and i wasn’t ready to let it go. even thinking about it now brings tears to my eyes.
there’s something almost magical about the way a single breath of air can undo time. it’s called the “proust effect,” named after the moment a french writer bit into a tea-soaked madeleine and found his entire childhood rushing back to him. neurologically it’s a phenomenon where a scent instantly triggers a vivid, emotional, and spontaneous autobiographical memory.
our brains process smell differently than any other sense. unlike sight or sound, scent signals skip the brain’s usual relay station and go straight to the emotional centre of the brain. that’s why a smell can undo you in a way a photo never quite manages. it’s also why these memories often feel more emotionally charged than memories triggered by words or images. and they last. studies show visual memory fades significantly over time, but scent memories can stay vivid and accurate even decades later.
that’s what makes seasonal scents so special: they let you keep a piece of a season somewhere your camera roll can’t reach. a photo shows you what a moment looked like. a scent lets you feel it again—the way the air smelled right before the first snow, or what your kitchen smells like every october. some memories were never meant to be stored in pixels. they live in your senses instead, which feels so intimate to me.
my favourite ways to incorporate scent seasonally:
seasonal perfume wardrobes
light the same candle at the same time of every year
christmas stovetop simmer pot
saving specific scents for big life events
use scent to mark a trip — buy a soap or candle from a vacation
do you remember the songs that would play at junior high dances? the slow ones where everyone feels a little awkward, wanting to dance but not sure how? getting asked for a slow dance (with room for left for jesus between your bodies)? i bet you do. for me, despite being in jr. high in 2009, it was aerosmiths i don't want to miss a thing. every single time i hear that, i’m transported to the school gymnasium, decorated for the dance, lights low, people swaying with the music.
music might be one of the most powerful memory-keepers of all. give your seasons a soundtrack, and you’ll never lose them. when you hear an old favourite song, before you even remember the lyrics, you remember the feeling. the backseat of a car, the window down, a party with your friends, the same song on repeat all summer long.
so let certain songs belong to certain seasons. the album that was on repeat the summer everything felt possible. the song that was playing the first time you danced together in the kitchen. the playlist you made for a heartbreak you don’t feel anymore, but can still hear the shape of. collect physical cds and records, and put together a playlist for each season of your life. you could even go old school and burn your personal playlists on a disc (don’t ask me how, that’s between you and google).
what makes music so good at holding memory is that it moves at the speed time actually moved. a photo freezes a single second, but a song unfolds the way a moment did. when you hear it again and you’re not just recalling an image, you’re re-living those few minutes, feeling by feeling, the way you actually lived it the first time.
years from now, someone could play four seconds of a song and you’d be nineteen again, or freshly heartbroken, or falling in love, without ever meaning to time travel at all. that’s the gift of a seasonal soundtrack—it gives you back those precious few moments.
a life well lived isn’t made up of all the biggest moments, most of it is ordinary days stacking up into a life. but the bigger moments are the ones that tend to stick out for decades in memory. the ones that become chapter titles when you look back at the book that is your life. sometimes these moments unfold naturally, but often we have to create the magic. be an architect of your own big, memorable moments. don’t wait for a milestone to hand you a memory, build one on purpose. it doesn’t have to be extravagant. it just has to be intentional: something different enough from your everyday that your mind flags it as worth keeping. so that in the future you can think “oh yeah, remember summer 2026? that was the year i ______”.
it could be taking the trip you keep almost booking. saying yes to the spontaneous day trip. running into the ocean even though its still early in the summer and the water is way too cold. learning something new just for the story of learning it. swimming in the rain. the goal isn’t to make every season extraordinary, it’s to make sure each one has at least one thing in it that didn’t happen any other year.
memory needs some contrast to hold onto something. the more a moment breaks the pattern of your normal days, the more likely it is to survive in your mind years from now.
i like to create my own traditions for each season. each season has holidays that come with traditions already built in, and i love those, but i like to create my own as well. something that's mine, that no calendar assigns and no one else is required to celebrate.
pick a weekend to go away for a few nights, have a summerween movie night, an autumn leaf peeping drive, a place you visit every year for your birthday. then treat it like a real holiday. because that's kind of what a tradition is—a holiday you invented for yourself. commit to it the way you would to any other important date: book the time off, put it on the calendar before anything else can take the slot, tell people in advance so they know not to ask for that weekend. protect it like it matters, because it does.
the beauty of a tradition is that it doesn’t rely on just memory, it also builds anticipation and reflection into the same moment. you spend the weeks before looking forward to it, and the years after looking back on every version of it, stacked on top of each other. one summerween becomes five, then ten, and suddenly you’re not just remembering a single night, you’re remembering a decade of them, each one slightly different, and unmistakably yours.
i love having traditions as memory-keepers. a single moment fades, but a moment you return to year after year becomes a thread running through your whole life, one you can pick up and follow all the way back.
keep memories in more ways than just photos or written words. hold on to things like concert tickets, boarding passes, a mug or magnet from a trip. pressed leaves and flowers, birthday and christmas cards, postcards from trips or letters sent to you. any object that holds a story and reminds you of that time in your life. hang on to them not because they’re useful, but because they’re proof of the moment you wanted to hold onto. i like to store mine in a memory box (or a few, for different phases of my life), so they're always patiently waiting for me to open them back up and relive the memories.
keeping physical mementos lets you touch and hold the memory. you can turn it over in your hands, feel the worn edges of a ticket stub that’s been through a wallet and a decade. it makes the memory tangible in a way a screen never could, because the object was actually there.
and unlike a photo, these objects don’t ask to be looked at. they just wait. you’ll forget about that ticket stub for months, maybe years, and then one day you’ll open a drawer looking for something else entirely, and there it’ll be, pulling you straight back to a night you hadn’t thought about in ages.
write a little memoir at the end of each season. okay, this kind of ties into journaling, but sometimes journaling is more of a practice in presence, not always looking back. write a memoir at the end of each season, describing the moments from june that still stick out in your mind at the end of august. write your seasonal memoir more like a story. not a log of what happened week by week, but about how the season actually felt. the emotions it carried, the lessons it taught you, the version of yourself you were for those few months. the bright shining moments and the mundane ones all poured onto a page where you can visit them again.
to me, a memoir is selective in a way a regular journal isn’t. journaling tends to catch everything, in order, close to the moment it happened. perfect for recounting a day with detail. a seasonal memoir catches what stayed and lingered in your mind. by the time you sit down to write it, your brain has already done the sorting for you. what’s left is what actually mattered, and writing it down while it’s still warm keeps it from fading any further. your memoir doesn’t need to be about the highlight reel. it needs to be honest about what the season actually felt like to live through, highs and lows and all the unremarkable hours in between.
do this every season, and you’ll end up with something a camera roll or a day-to-day journal never quite gives you: a full, felt account of who you were, pressed into pages you can return to and step back into, long after the season itself has passed.
i hope this post can serve as inspiration to give your memories the attention they deserve. because as much as we want to think we will remember everything, we never do. and i don't say that as a panic-inducing warning or omen, but rather because i know how quickly time passes, and how sometimes i wish i could recall details that are now lost to it. there's a reason those photos from the 90s feel so much warmer than the ones from last year in my camera roll — the memory is further away, more forgotten, but the care that went into keeping it is something i still feel every time i open the old albums.
someday, all of this will just be your favourite chapter. start collecting it now.
with love, kyla
ps. if you feel called to share, what's one memory you wish you'd held onto a little tighter?
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