When we emptied my parents house, I became keeper of the photos (and old letters and other such paperphernalia) I've had them quite some time now and have gone through the photos several times, making piles for each sister and shipping them off. But there are still mountains of them. I thought I'd put a few up here for archival sake ... and because I still haven't finished my HCJ.
As second daughter, I always felt there were never any photos of me, compared to the mountains of pictures of #1 daughter. After sorting through all the boxes, though, I find there are more than enough of the Virgo daughter. This one is not of me but it is my Dad and it's (obviously) Christmas 1952 - in the old Laburnam Manor apartments. The little girl is the same-age daughter of their friends. As I look at this I can just barely remember the couch, mostly because I remember when they bought a better one about 1957. Once that couch came in the house, Daddy forbid any of us to ever chew gum. I, being the fastidious Virgo I am, never could understand why he thought anybody would put chewed up gum on furniture. Ick. Gross.
Here is BabyTheQueen a little later, in warmer weather, still in the old neighborhood. There are lots of summertime photos of the mothers sitting around wading pools with their toddlers. Very post-war modern. This photo reminds me most of LD when he was about that age.
About 6 months later we went to Florida for Christmas. That is where my first memories come from, but I don't remember anything about being there. All I remember is crying for 1,000 miles in the back seat because I'd burned my leg on a floor heating grate and opening up the pink cellophane windowed box with Tiny Tears inside.
Classic photography by Mama - somebody is always cropped out of the image.
Babies and puppies are a lot alike. Here I am making a pest of myself around my big sister. Antipathy begins early.
A family group. My love affair with oceans began early.
This has the look of Easter to me and since the sidewalks are so broad and the opposite side of the street is visible. I am guessing it's in Washington DC, at my grandmother's house. That hat was a trademark of mine for years. I suppose I out grew it by the time I was about 3 or 4 but I loved that hat and a pair of red punched out sandals more than anything I owned (Tiny Tears being a real live baby so I didn't actually "own" her. I understood these fine distinctions very early on.)
Later we moved to a new little starter house in what was then the West End (really Henrico County) - a geographical delineation that is constantly moving towards the sunset. Before we moved in the yard was full of pine trees, because the neighborhood was carved out of a tidewater Virginia pine forest. My parents had ours all taken down, a great tragedy for me, but mother said that pine trees were dirty trees that dropped sap on everything. Which is funny since later we had a different big yard full of them and nothing was ever done about them except, when we were bad and then our punishment was to rake up the pine tags. Pine tags fall year 'round, you know.
This neighborhood was chock full of boomer babies. They couldn't build schools fast enough to hold us all, so 1st and 2nd grade only went half day. Now, there's a new elementary school right at the end of the block I lived on.
Here is another Christmas Photo and you can be sure that from age 5 through age about 11 I was mortified by it, with me squatting there, showing my underpants.
I looked and looked at this photo trying to figure out where it was taken. It looks a lot like my grandmother's living room, only smaller. Finally I realized it was the StepUp Home we moved to in Bon Air - or really, just over the Chesterfield County line on the south side. That's SlightlyOlderTheQueen in the red dress and I'm doing something with my youngest sister - probably making her face the camera. The little boy is one of my mother's nephew's; Uncle Billy's kids.
Yeah yeah yeah. I know. I thought I'd be done with that sweater by now, too. Guess I frittered away too much of this weekend on the Internets. I want to take my car in for a wash this afternoon so I'd best get back to those needles. Maybe a FO photo tomorrow.
It's seriously windy again today. We had awful brush fires on Saturday - let us hope there won't be a repeat today.
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