Years ago I tried scrapbooking. I even took a class. I dropped plenty of coins on all the gear, got my photos together and followed my teacher’s instructions to the letter. I cropped my pictures to the bone, placed them well, decorated, themed and made a few pages. It was OK but somehow disturbing. My efforts were pleasing to the eye but the lack of backgrounds in the pictures bothered me.Soon I was just nipping off the corners with a fingernail clipper, attaching the entire photos on the special acid-free pages, adding a few splashes of color with stickers, dates and backdrop paper. My instructor checked my progress. She shook her head, making little tsk-tsk noises, and tried to explain the necessity of cropping photos in the scrapbook world. She encouraged me to trim the photos into shapes and outline the main characters to get rid of the unnecessary bits and pieces in the distance. I looked at her with a mixture of shock and horror as if she had said the price of gas would soon hit $3. Cutting off and discarding the background of my photos assimilated to removing pieces of my past! The class was not graded but I would have certainly gotten an ‘F’ for "Failure to Crop."Cropping is something I cannot do in my life with my photos or much of anything else for that matter. I want to see that tree in the background of that print to remember that we planted it; to recall what size it was in reference to my children at that point in time; to remember its demise in a violent cross wind; to feel the tingle in my spine when I remember how frightened I was with three little children in that storm.I cannot imagine a photo of my siblings and me at my grandparents’ home without the background of the long-departed candy dish full of stale pink-and-white peppermints on top of the white plastic doily kept on the shiny coffee table in front of the nylon-looped tan sofa that refused to show any signs of wear. That couch was square, solid and hideous. It left patterned impressions on the backs of bare legs and felt like sandpaper on a young cheek. I envision it now, 35 years later, in perfect blocky shape in a lake cabin somewhere. It sits in the background of a photo taken with a digital camera where it will be transferred to a computer and then deemed worthy of deleting, storing on disk, printing or, heaven forbid, cropping. Speaking of memories, I recall seeing a movie about a young couple. The man hired a very expensive artist to paint a portrait of his wife whom he loved dearly. The portrait was exquisite and matched her to a tee. There was a terrible accident. She was killed and he was blinded.His sister came to live with him and he did all right until a few years down the road. He started getting real moody and silent. He would lock himself in his study for hours on end. Curiosity finally got the better of the sister and one day she carefully put a ladder up to the study window.There was her brother standing on a chair running his fingers over the painting of his wife. The darkness had swallowed him and his mind could no longer remember the face of his beloved. He was trying to use the texture of the portrait to help him recall. I weep just thinking about it. I am troubled to recently learn a dear friend that I visit with regularly has been diagnosed with early onset dementia. It is the beginning of Alzheimer’s but no one wants to call it that. I have heard that the memory uses triggers. Scents are huge memory prompts but many different things can set off a recollection. What if the background clutter of my photos is the one things that will someday help me remember the names that go with the smiling faces? Or even what they were smiling about? It is a chance I choose not to take. I refuse to crop my photographs of background clutter from the days gone by. What good is closing the gate if I can’t remember who opened it or why?Story ideas and comments can be e-mailed to at Nancy861@msn.com or called in at 962-3411.