jimsjournal
|
jimsjournal |
|||||
|
| The Winter Solstice is still more than a month away and yet it is so dark
so early. Maybe this is because Daylight Savings Time lasted an extra week?
We've only had two weeks to become accustomed to the dark? It's just 4:30
as I sit here typing -- already five minutes past sunset. I've been spending some time today trying to bring some order to the chaos that is our basement, sorting through boxes of stuff. I did manage to accumulate a large amount of paper to go out in our paper recycling bin (plus a small pile of paper to go through my shredder first) and a plastic grocery bag filled with junk to go out in the trash. Of course that still leaves me with the need to properly store the stuff that is to be kept. In the course of this I came upon a book -- Historic Ulster -- a folk history of Ulster County (New York), the area where I grew up. I flipped it open (always a danger when attempting to bring order to chaos, it is all too easy to get lost in a couple of page in this book and a couple of pages in that book, etc.) and discovered an old photograph tucked away in the book. I took it out and fanned through the pages and found another photograph. They were both dated 1944 and I am in both of them. In the first I am being held by my mother and in the other I am being held by my grandmother. I was born in April of 1943, so I am a year plus a few months when these were taken.
1944 -- It's obviously warm weather. Dad went ashore in France as part of the D-Day invasion so he could have been somewhere in France when these pictures were taken. They appear to have been taken on Broadway in Kingston (guessing that the Coca-Cola sign is for a restaurant on Broadway) but I don't recognize the sign or the building. At that time my grandparents lived on one of the side streets off of Broadway (can't remember if it was Pine Grove Avenue or Hoffman Street) so I'm assuming these pictures were taken somewhere in that mid-town area.. Mom looks so young -- but she only would have been thirty-five when she and her mother took these pictures of each other holding me. From the backs of these photographs, it would appear that they had once been glued in an album, but my mother always used those little corner things to hold pictures in her albums... and these are not the same size as the photographs in her albums. Nor are these pictures that I can remember looking at when I was a kid (I used to love to look at photographs, both the ones my mother would have put in an album and the ones just stored in envelopes). So I am puzzled as to how they ended up in that book, but I am glad to have found them.. Glimpses into another era.
|
||||||
