Much to my chagrin, it appears as though time travel has not been invented, and never will be. If it existed then surely we’d know by now. Some impatient teen from the future would make certain to come back and tell us what the future holds, unless we learned our lesson from Marty McFly, and time travelers have become discreet. I doubt that though.Since time travel doesn’t exist, we’re left with the next best thing: photographs. What are photographs if not time travel? They let us see a certain time and place that no longer exists. (Unless it does exist, and then we’re back to that time travel question.)Writing is somewhat similar, and so is storytelling, but photographs capture time and place in a more concrete form. An elderly veteran can tell us what happened on the beaches of Normandy, and that’s a lot like writing, but the only way to see what happened is in photographs.I’m lucky that for the past fifteen years I’ve had a person by my side who has visually chronicled almost every single important event in my life. My wife.In recent years it’s not unusual for people to chronicle their life in pictures. For the love of god, that’s why Facebook exists. But most people who take pictures, do so casually. They whip out their phone, press a button, and maybe post it online or go back to it three months from now and look at it on a screen smaller than their palm.It’s serious business for my wife though. She’s got one of those fancy cameras with a detachable flash. When she shoots in our house at night anyone passing by might think there’s a lightning storm inside. And she doesn’t so much take pictures as she constructs them. She doesn’t manipulate the scene (except to clear clutter out of the background or foreground, a constant point of contention between us), but somehow when she points the camera and clicks, the results are a thousand times better than when I do it.When talking about pictures there are snapshots and there are photographs. My wife takes photographs.The camera has become so ubiquitous that if we venture on a family outing without it, the kids want to know why she didn’t bring it.That’s not to say that they’re always happy about my wife’s healthy obsession. On most holidays she has created a tradition whereby we take a family picture in a designated location. On the front porch for 4th of July and Halloween, on the couch for Christmas and New Year’s. Because these are holidays, the kids are naturally excited and a bit fidgety, which means we pose for eight, or ten, or thirty pictures before everyone cooperates. Eventually the kids become impatient, but at least they learn that “Just one more,” doesn’t usually mean just one more.Most of the time, they’re picture superstars though. They’ve all had their picture taken so often that they usually know precisely what to do when a camera is pointed in their direction. We’ve been out in public and strangers have commented about how well they pose and smile.My wife loves taking pictures, and we are the beneficiaries. Because even when we don’t feel like posing for “just one more” after spending an afternoon hiking in the Arizona sun, or when we have to smile for the camera before taking a bite out of the first ice cream cone of the year, or we have to hold our present up for the camera before opening the next one, my wife makes us do it.She makes us do it because she knows more keenly than any of us how valuable those pictures are. She knows that once those moments happen, they’re gone. We’ll have memories of them, and if we have the time and the inclination, we might write about them. But if it weren’t for her, we’d never again see them. Our minds might never go back to that particular place, at that particular time. But as soon as we see that picture, we can go back. We can relive the moment, or just remember it.And not losing those moments is the most valuable thing I can think of.