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still hard to believe Gabe and I had just celebrated our fifth anniversary. This whole memory fair had started me thinking about my scattered photographs and memorabilia. I had become interested enough in scrapbooking to start going through them, dividing and organizing pictures by year. What a task it was turning out to be. What I was learning was I almost always took too many photos of the same thing and not enough of things that mattered, that is, things that were now gone. Of course, how was I to know back then that they’d disappear? I wished I had more photos of Jack and me when we were teenagers, more photos of Gabe and me when we were dating or of my favorite jeans in high school, the ones I spent hours embroidering. I wished there were photos of Jack’s work boots, of his hands, of the first calf I helped deliver, the first meal I ever cooked for Jack and for Gabe. How I longed for a close-up of my mother’s hands, her earlobes, her feet. I sometimes stared at my own bare feet and wondered if my toes looked like hers.
    But what could a person do, mount a camera on her head and record her whole life? Sometimes you just had to make do with the memories in your mind. I suspected those memories, photographed through the cheesecloth of time, might ultimately be more kind.
    The steady rain had softened to a mist during my ten-mile drive back to San Celina. The emerald hills spotted with blue lupine and the occasional early patch of California poppies were a photographer’s dreamscape. It was one of those extraordinary Central Coast spring days in a year where we’d been receiving enough rain to turn our normally dun-colored landscape the brilliant green of a Disney cartoon. The beauty of this land—my home—never ceased to amaze me. I might be Arkansas born, but I’d been raised here. Rich, dark California soil flowed through my veins.
    After dropping Scout off at home, the California Craftsman bungalow that Gabe and I were slowly remodeling, I headed across town to the Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum. Though my job often drove me batty, what with dealing with fussy society patrons, temperamental artists, the kooky and unpredictable public and an ever penny-pinching bureaucracy, I still loved it. Between overseeing the running of the museum and its exhibits and the artists’ co-op affiliated with the museum, the job was never boring, and it even allowed me to utilize my dubiously valuable history degree from Cal Poly.
    I pulled my purple Ford Ranger pickup into the museum’s half-full parking lot. The old Sinclair Hacienda (donated by our first and most dependable patron, Constance Sinclair) looked sparkling today. The white adobe walls looked freshly painted though likely it was the rain that contributed to their clean surfaces. The double front door had been recently stained and the black hardware painted. The red tiled Spanish roof had a small amount of green algae, but D-Daddy would take care of it before it became a problem. Delbar “D-Daddy” Boudreaux was my dynamite assistant whom I’d just promoted to property manager (along with a well-deserved raise) despite the fact that he and I were the museum’s only paid employees. He cared for these buildings with the same love he’d no doubt lavished on the commercial fishing boat he’d owned in Louisiana before retiring in San Celina.
    I pulled open the heavy front door and entered the museum’s lobby gift shop. The products for sale in the glass cases—cards, hand-painted scrapbooks, colorful signature wall quilts, memory lockets—reflected both the Memory Festival coming this Saturday and our corresponding exhibits.
    The main exhibit downstairs was called I Remember When—Quilts as Personal History . It displayed a variety of story quilts that celebrated everything from a sixty-six-year marriage to a winning Little League tournament to celebrating ten years of sobriety to a Cambodian family’s first year in the United States. There were twenty-five