The Donnellys are notorious storytellers. Get 2 of them in a room and they're competing for air space like Speakers' Corner. As a listener, it was hard to decide who to pay attention to. You'd hear chuckles from the other side of the room and felt like you missed out on something good. Putting the oral tradition aside for a moment, my family has also placed great value on photographs. Living in southern California we were plagued with a few natural disasters at our home on Washburn road : a mudslide, a brush fire. Yes, we lived to tell those "Remember when?" stories but when that decisive moment arrived when we had to rescue items before the flames reached our house, it was the family photo albums we loaded in the car first.

submitted by Erin Donnelly
age 25
Brooklyn, New York, USA
submitted August 1998