While I was looking through my scanned photo albums to locate the photos I used in the previous post, I naturally went down a rabbit hole. It wasn't the rabbit hole that surprised me as much as seeing that so many of these photos directly contradicted what I had in my memory of the events. And it wasn't details so much as times.
The only explanation—other than a wildly faulty memory—is that I know my parents were notorious for shooting a roll of film over the course of weeks or months and then often waiting an equal amount of time before getting the pictures developed (A lot of Christmas pictures are date stamped March or April of the following year!). So even though a many of the scanned photos in my collection have the processing date on the border, those can't be taken as accurate indicators of when things actually happened, and I realize that. Adding to the confusion is the fact that when my parents divorced, the original photo albums were split up, destroying the accurate timeline that had existed in those albums throughout my childhood and teen years. When my grandmother moved in with my Mom several years after the divorce and Mom decided to fold her photos into the already messed up albums based on date stamps things went from bad to worse. Six feet of snow in October? Okay, it's possible I suppose, but it's far more likely it was six feet of snow from the previous winter and the pictures didn't get printed until the following October.
And don't even get me started on the duplicates I'm still weeding out.
This still doesn't explain how I remember that Dad traded the yellow truck with the camper in on a new gray truck, but the date stamps indicate just the opposite (and my sister looking younger in the gray truck picture than she is in the yellow truck one!).
Faulty memory? Mandala Effect? More likely just the fucked up date stamps…somehow.