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.

Lizards and Watermelons in Texas

It’s 105-degrees on the back fence of The Clanton Hacienda, according to the analog thermometer that’s hanging from a loose nail on the weathered fence.
I believe it.
It’s hot.

There are usually a pair of yearling lizards basking on a wire enclosure for the family mascot. They’re missing this afternoon, otherwise they’d be baking instead of basking.

The siblings are less than two inches long, and if they survive the coming winter, and don’t get crushed in the backdoor slamming, they’ll make a fine addition to the family of Brown Caribbean Anoles that have adopted my back yard.

An article in Texas Monthly a few years back reported the browns were chasing out the green variety of Anoles. The greens have taken the high road, however, and are now residing in nearby trees and bushes. My resident clan of browns can be seen peering out from between the weep holes in the brick walls of my house. In the shade.

There is one good antidote for the Texas heat in July, and that’s a chilled Texas watermelon, fresh of the truck. (My cousin, Sue, treated me to a dandy over the weekend, buying one for each of us. Mine hibernated in the “back refrigerator,” along with assorted soft drinks and bottles of drinking water, for which the temperature control is set to icy slush. I sliced it up and set the chunks in a giant Tupperware bowl—what I didn’t eat while I was carving.)

You know a watermelon is going to be good when you set the knife in the rinds, and the melon opens along its natural fissures in the meat. The red is a tempting complement to the stripped-green outer shell, especially when it’s nearly the same temperature as tundra. This one was obviously one of Wharton County’s finest for the season.

We bought the melons from a father and son at the traffic light in Boling, Texas. FM 447 intersects FM 1301 at that light—the only one in town. There’s a fine pecan orchard just to the north of where Caney Creek languishes under the asphalt, one of many in the region famous for nuts.  I’m pretty certain that watermelon was picked that very morning, because of the way it naturally gave up its goodness when the first slice was made.

I traveled to the Holy Land with my father a few years back, and the one thing that impressed me most—besides trodding in the footsteps of The Savior—was the amazingly fresh food we ate at every meal. Farm to table in a matter of days, if not hours.

We’ve got that in Texas, too—those pecans that fall after the first frost in November, and that delicious, crisp and sweet Wharton County watermelon.
That’s a slice of heaven.