I remember when you would scuttle to my feet, eyes glaring with eagerness…and I would act the role of the ever ready historian, telling tales of our past, though I feared to you it might be bleak, I would tell you stories of Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela… stories of heroes back home in Africa…and you, you never showed any inhibition, you wanted to know everything and I was ready to tell all that I knew…

I remember when I tried explaining to you that people from the 80’s and 90’s weren’t black and white actually, and you would run off to retrieve the old family album and point out pictures of your great aunties and uncles and with a quizzical look on your face you would say ‘see Nona, y’all was black and white and grey too, even Martin Luther’…and I would smile and say ‘oh but really we were all so pretty and colourful, just as we are now’…

And I remember your smile, it resonated through your eyes, through your heart and through mine. Watching you laugh was a pleasure, and when I could, I would take a picture…it was black and white, that was not my choosing but it remains with me as the most beautiful memories of you…

Now you’re gone and I wish everyday that you would come home. I’m old and grey but not without my colours…you told me in your last email ‘Nona, this is the 21st century, nothing is black and white anymore, except you choose to make it that way’, child, I tell you, I’ve read that time and time again, and in it I see more than you’ve written, more than you know…

The pictures you send are all so beautiful and all so colourful…full of life…spirited, but child, I hope the memories are too. I hope they would reawaken in you, as do yours now, times of love and hope, fun-times, trying times… I hope you do not just smile for the likes and for the followers. I hope if after years to come, you would look at them and smile, and maybe tell your children ‘these are the days when my greatest memories were made…and these are the people I made them with’

‘Cos truly you never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory’…and yes pictures do tell a thousand stories but more than the flash of the camera, more than the clicking of your phones…let these days remain engraved in your heart, where it’ll never fade…where it’ll never be black and white or grey…

#happy new year everyone… Make beautiful memories with every single day! (not like there’s anything particularly wrong with black and white, in the literal sense 🙂 )…toodles