Photographs & Memories

 

It is the middle of January, and the earth has frozen solid. My bride and I are commemorating the cold by staying in our pajamas, making chili, and sipping hot cocoa. I don’t usually like hot drinks, other than black coffee, but when the temperature is in the low 20’s in Southeast Texas, I make exceptions.

I have been entrusted with an old photo album from an aunt who has been gone for several years. Maxine was the oldest of six girls—my mother was third in that pecking order of sisters. They shared an older brother whose job it was to keep them all in line.
Or so they say.

The album is a mish-mash of black and white prints from cameras of various vintages, now yellowed with age. Some of the notations on the back are as interesting as the images on the front: “Bertha’s School Pic. Gore, Okla.” Bertha Brown was my grandmother. I scan the faces of these young children peering back from the early 20^th century; was my grandmother really ever that young?
She was.

Another photo is marked, “George Edwards & a friend,” probably snapped in the early ‘teens. Nineteen-teens, that is. I see the face of my Grandpa unmarked by the lines and creases that were so characteristic in his later years.
I see myself.

There is also a photo of my Aunt Maxine standing before a wisteria bush, dressed to the nine’s. The notation on the back says, “This is not a good one of Maxine, but she sent all the good ones to Jack.” The date is 1944. It is wartime.

I find it fascinating to note the places and times at which these images were captured. I recognize the house in which my maternal grandparents lived until they passed, located in the small burg of “Iago,” deep in Wharton County. I suspect some of the photos are from Gore, Ok. as well. There’s a snapshot of a small child on an ancient tricycle. That tricycle appears in the background of another photo of my grandfather as a young adult, too, and I wonder as to the connection between the two photos. The marking on the back indicates the film may have been processed by “Kelley Photo Studio,” somewhere in Texas. And the very ones who could answer this riddle now belong to the ages.

There are photos, too, of my late mother as a young girl and as a teen, always with at least one or more of her sisters. These are somewhat poignant to me as the first anniversary of her passing draws near…
a subject for another post.