More memories...

More memories ... from my mom's photo collection...

This is me, in an undated photo that appears to be a studio portrait.  On the back, in my mom's handwriting: “Tommy”.  It's printed on fancy embossed paper; unusual in her collection.  I am unaccountably excited about (apparently) the shoes I've torn off my feet.  If I'm about one in that photo, then this is circa '53...

Here's my brother Mark, in another undated photo.  He's so small in this one that it has to be from early '61.  My mom wrote “Mark our ‘Indian’” on the back.  I don't remember mom ever referring to Mark as an Indian, and I'm not sure where that remark comes from.  Something about his appearance?

Here's a scene from a Christmas morning we've seen in earlier photos.  The lab dated this January 1958, so this must have been Christmas 1957.  The bookshelves are up (at right), and I can see some of those Reader's Digest condensed novels on them.  There are a bazillion or two toys I don't remember at all.  The baby carriage surprises me – Holly, Scott, and I would have been too old for it at that point, I'd have thought – and Mark hadn't yet arrived on the scene.  At the right you can see the World Book encyclopedia that my parents picked up at a garage sale, for next to nothing.  That encyclopedia had a huge impact on me; over the course of the next few years I read the entire thing.  That rack held all 28 volumes in two rows; you're seeing the left part of the upper row.  I knew every one of those volumes very well, and I'd bet that even today I could navigate it instantly.

Dated by the lab March 1959, this photo was taken in our home's front yard, looking south.  The subject is the tree in the middle, a Magnolia grandiflora that later grew much larger, along with several others in the same planting.  Behind the magnolia you can see our flagpole sticking up.  I don't recognize the dog, but I'll guess that it's one of Chalky's hounds, loose for some reason.  The little building to the left of the magnolia is Chalky's little storage/shop building.  The row of trees on the left puzzles me.  I remember several nice blue Atlas cedar specimens in a sparse row there, not those low shrubs.

This is my sister Holly, in a photo the lab dated February 1959; my mom wrote “Holly” on the back.  She'd have been almost 4 years old.  She's holding one of the peat-potted hollies that my dad sold by mail order for a few years, shipping them in bright red cardboard tubes by parcel post.  The pot is made from pressed peat moss that was folded into that form when wet (unlike the peat pots today that are pressure-formed in a mold).  The heavy pressed peat held a lot of water.  We'd wet the pots well, insert the entire plant into a thick plastic bag, tie it up with a twist-'em, stuff it in the cardboard tube, tape the tube shut, then paste on the customer's address.  It was quite a process, and I remember spending quite a few hours on various stages of it.  Oddly I don't remember my brothers and sisters helping with it – was it really only me?  Memory is a funny thing...

Here's a nice photo of the old homestead.  The lab dated it October 1954, and my mom wrote “house” on the back (in case we forgot, I guess!).  The long side in view is the east side of the house, with the south end visible toward the left.  My bedroom was in the southeast corner; its two windows are visible.  The fence I don't remember is clearly visible on the north side (toward the right).  The classic old wood frame and formed steel body wheelbarrow tells me that my dad was working somewhere around there – that wheelbarrow was a basic tool for him, like a carpenter's rip saw.  Visible on the front porch roof is some fancy decorative woodwork (inside the angled brace).  I don't remember that at all!