Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Family Treasures

In one month, my 25th high school reunion will be held in Oklahoma City, OK.  I'm actually going to attend this one as I haven't been to any others.  In preparation, I wanted to find a few select photos to share on Facebook with my high school friends.  But first, I needed to find my photo albums.  That was quite a task.

Finding albums from my college years was easy.  They have been moved with me over the years as I've changed locations and lived in four states.  But of course, the college albums didn't have what I wanted.

Time to start digging through the boxes which have been sitting in the basement since my parents divorce.  At the same time my mother was packing her belongings (following the divorce), I took the opportunity to retrieve my own belongings.  It was an insane day of packing and I hadn't looked through my childhood 'stuff' since that day.  The photo albums I wanted were among my childhood belongings.

Yippee, yay, I finally found them!!  Besides the photos from summer music festivals, award ceremonies, graduation, and a few band pictures, I found pictures of my cats, my friends, and my family.  Not too many pictures of my family members, unfortunately, just the ones I took with my own camera.

Our family photo albums have been 'lost' somewhere in the aftermath of the divorce.  To the best of my knowledge, my mother does not have them.  I certainly haven't seen them here in Virginia.  My father says that he doesn't have them.  And I know that they weren't in the traditional storage location when my mom packed her final belongings, because I looked for them specifically.

As a result any photos I might have of myself as a little person are treasured.  These random photos eventually came to me as loose items after different family members passed away over the years.

Here is one such photo where I was not even a year old.  Looks like I was finally growing some fuzz on my head.  We are in front of my great-grandmother's house.  I was very fortunate to have known five grandparents (2nd spouses included) and six great-grandparents while growing up.

The next photo is one which I found in my high school albums.  Here are four generations of females: my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and myself.  That's my brother in the back.  This picture was taken on Mother's Day in 1984 and my great-grandmother died later that year in October.  She was only 82 years old.

I was very close to this great-grandmother and was devastated when she died.  She was often my babysitter and taught me to crochet when I was little, as I seemed to always need to be doing something with my hands.  It was later that the 'something' became playing the piano.  Piano, books, a deck of cards, and cats were favored in my childhood.  Not so much different than today.

Maybe I'll have to scan a collection of 'Lisa with cats' photos and share them sometime.

6 comments:

  1. Love, love, love the old photos! Such treasures. I have been wanting to scan in my BW ones from the 50's on up. Time and my hands have prevented this so far but it is moving up fast on my to do list. I am just not sure how well my scanner will do the job...so may be an output to buy a better one also. We shall see. I would love to see the you and kitty pics too :-)

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  2. Nice to see these treasures. best wishes, mary

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  3. Oh, I love old photos! How wonderful to have had so many grandparents!

    I have very few of myself as well. My brother threw them all out while "helping" me clean out my parent's house before we put it up for sale :(

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  4. Old photos are so fun. Take me right back to a time and place. I found one the other day tucked into a book of my first cat - remembering how she used to lay on my bed with the stuffed animals and we had conversations galore.

    Family photos are the best do share some more!

    Jan

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  5. I love old photos and the memories of our lives! So glad you were close to your Grandmother, I was close to mine too.

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  6. How wonderful! You look like your mom for sure! What a treat. A divorce steals so much away.

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