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.