The gift was for my grandmother.
The magic is for everyone.
I made that first book so my grandmother could color the ones she loved the most.
What I didn't expect was how much love she got back with every page she colored.
That's why there's Love in Color.
Inside every photo, there’s line art to color. Inside every memory, there’s a story to tell.
Gammy Turned Ninety-Five.
My grandmother loved to color. So for her ninety-fifth birthday I thought: why not make a coloring book of our family photos?
It took days. It was tedious. But her face when she opened it made it worth it.
The book went around the room, from one family member to the next. Everyone found themselves in it, and everyone had a memory to share.
When it finally reached my cousin, she pulled her young daughter onto her lap, turned to a page, and said:
And in that instant, I, too, was five years old.
That's how old I was when my mother died. It was sudden. What I remember of that time is not the loss so much as the quiet around it — how hard it was for everyone to talk about her, and how badly I wanted them to.
I craved the stories. Nobody knew how to start.
I understood in that moment what I had been missing all those years. Some way to start.
Who Spends an Hour With a Photograph?
Most pictures get a couple of seconds. You scroll past, or you turn the page. Even the framed ones stop getting looked at.
Coloring is the slowest thing you can do with a picture. An hour on a single page — long enough to notice the sunglasses, the wallpaper, the dog half out of frame.
With someone next to you, that hour fills up with talk. Hands are busy, nobody has to hold eye contact, and the page asks the questions for you — who is that, when was that, what happened next. The answers run from a bad haircut to a story you've never heard.
On your own, it fills up with something quieter. You work across the page an inch at a time — the coat, the hands, the light on the wall behind — and somewhere in there it stops being a picture and you're in the room. You're not remembering the day. You're in it. An hour later you come back out.
That's the part a photo album can't do. An album is something you look at. This is something you do.