When I was a kid, my mom used to get an occasional kick of out of asking my younger brother and I rhetorical questions. You always knew there was a &uot;right&uot; and &uot;wrong&uot; answer to the question, and she was going to teach you a lesson by telling you the &uot;right&uot; answer if you didn’t get it.

I remember one time in particular. &uot;If the house was on fire, and you could only save one thing you owned,&uot; she asked, &uot;what would it be?&uot;

I don’t remember what I said. Probably my Nintendo or my baseball cards or something I felt like I couldn’t live without.

Wrong answer.

The only thing in the house that could never be replaced, my mom instructed me, was the photos. We had albums full of them. If the house burned, you could always buy a new Nintendo or baseball cards, but you could never replace the photos of the vacation to Montana or the birthday party where my grandpa dunked my face into my chocolate cake for a laugh.

Yeah, my grandpa did that. I guess you could say he had an odd sense of humor.

Anyway, nowadays my family and I have our own collection of photos, and even though they only chronicle the last six or seven years, they have piled up to the point of crisis. Let’s put it this way: If our house were on fire today, it would be difficult to get them all out in one trip.

We have a strange way of approaching photos. When we buy a four-pack of film, we go on a shooting spree, as it were, using up rolls like nobody’s business. Then we go months without picking up a camera (outside of work, that is).

The spent film we shot usually sits around long enough that we forget what was on the roll, and we’re in no hurry to get them developed, until one day when we finally round up the rolls and bring them in.

We look through the photos, and then those little envelopes full of pictures end up in an area you might call &uot;the photo zone,&uot; a box filled with half-complete photo albums and loose envelopes of prints.

We always mean to organize all the photos into albums, but we neglected it so long that it became one of those projects you just dread starting, because you know it’s going to take forever.

Well, we finally cracked open that box recently and started going through them, trying to get them into chronological order and put them into something more secure than a pile of paper envelopes.

It was astounding. I had forgotten many of the photos had ever been taken. Some of the photos depicted things which I didn’t remember happening. And this was only going through the last six years.

You can note a series of trends in our photos. Earliest on, you’ll find mostly photos of vacations, parties and other special occasions. Trips to Wisconsin, New Year’s Eve celebrations in our friend’s tiny apartment, that kind of stuff. There weren’t too many shots of ordinary life.

Then we got cats. For some reason, this activated the photographic urge in both of us like nothing had before. This was especially true of the first cat. We’ve got shots of her sleeping, playing, eating a noodle off a plate, standing by a chair, standing by a Diet Coke bottle, sleeping in the sink. Or just sitting there. Then, when we got the second cat less than a year later, we had shots of the cats together in most of the above circumstances.

The next major phase is the post-child phase. This phase, I suspect, takes up the majority of most people’s photo albums. We’ve got photos of every stage of development, as well as all the special occasion shots like birthday parties and Halloween. Oddly, even at our most prolific photo-taking moments involving our son, we didn’t approach the efficiency with which we piled up photos of our beloved cats when they were so novel a presence in our home. We were probably too busy cleaning up after him to take as many photos.

Then there’s the special sections, those that chronicle all the vacations: To New York, to Quebec on our honeymoon, and of course our multiple trips to Mt. Horeb, Wis., home of the (should be) world-famous Mt. Horeb Mustard Museum, home of the planet’s largest collection of fine mustards.

After a couple days of on-and-off work, we had managed to put the photos into categories, within which they were in roughly chronological order. They are all labeled now, too, which is a big step.

But partway into pasting them into albums, we ran out of gas and got tired of having the project sprawled over the dining room table. The partly completed work got sealed back into the photo box and placed away out of sight, until the next time we get courageous and take on the task.

But I’ve been schooled once again on the power of photos. If the house was on fire, I guess I know what possession I’d go for first.

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays. E-mail him at dylan.belden@albertleatribune.com.