Kodak moments

Howard Tess, Elkhorn, about 1958

Ralph Pierce, Sherry Pierce, Buttons Bay, Wisconsin, about 1951

Me again, cooling off

I have been unable to post here because I fell off my bicycle. I didn't break anything, although I have a couple trophy bruises, and I was sore in more than a couple places. So instead of doing anything else physical, and risking hurting myself more, I settled into scanning some family photos from my mother's many albums, with the view of some cropping, annotating and organizing. How was I to know this would lead to several days of obssession?

Mother was the photographer of our family in the 1950's. She took pictures of everything and everyone, often several times in case the first two didn't turn out. Of course then she kept all the pictures, so there are multiples of all of us in our baby carriages, our high chairs, our cribs, our holiday clothes. Cats, dogs, new cars, houses, barns, tractors, toys, everything was captured on her Brownie camera (later Instamatic). My grandmother loved photos too, and demanded copies of everything, so when she died the albums were haphazardly merged. Chronology was lost. She wasn't as obsessive about identifying dates or people in the pictures. Many I know, being the first child, born in 1950. But some of the elders, the great aunts and uncles, the family friends, are lost to me. I have an aunt and an uncle left I can ask (though neither lives nearby), and one or two of my mother's high school friends, but it's frustrating to me have have holes in the fabric of our family story as told in black and white, and some fading color, photos.

These are a few recently scanned photos that speak to me of long ago summers.