Grateful Thursday: photos of my mother

I went home this past weekend to see my grandmother and visit with my parents at their house for a change, as they always come here. My father, an attorney by day, should have been a professional photographer or writer or something artistic, but his father would never have paid for a college tuition that didn't lead to a "real job." That's probably one of the few tragedies of his life (we all have them, you know). Luckily he found an outlet in art photography as a hobby, and over the years he's amassed over 3000 black and white negatives and who-knows-how-many color.

He got excited a couple weeks ago when I told him we were coming home because he's recently started trying to get all his photos saved online and on an external hard drive. For a man who only knows how to email, play in Ebay, and shop L.L. Bean online, he was having some trouble with Flickr and the hard drive. Previously, his very precious to me plethora of negatives had only been stored on actual flimsy negative rolls (those murky brown strips with the hole punches along the side we used to get back with prints... remember those?). One fire or burglar and they would have all been gone, over 30 years of memories and work. 

He started first by, slide by slide, putting them on CDs, but I talked him into the external hard drive and an online website in addition, and my little brother told him about Flickr. We want them in as many places as possible.

While he was playing around in Flickr, putting captions on pictures of my Granny and her garden from the late 1970s, I was flipping through the same set of photos in one of his photo albums. Around the same time he did a series of my mother sitting behind a fan and another few of her around a campfire with my grandmother and grandfather.

She was the age in those photos that I am now, and it was both beautiful and eerie to see her so frank and coy with my father, so alluring and fresh, with long hair and skinny limbs, smooth face staring into the camera lens with dark eyes, or glancing away, thin fingers resting on her chin. It was like peeking into my own life in a way, or at least a bit of the life that I am leading now as a young newly-married, pre-kids, playing with my husband the way she was playing with my father. She looked like the same woman but a different woman all at once. I was struck by how much she looked like me and my brothers but also fully herself, maybe more herself then than she looks now, more alive and confident, before children could reap her youth.

Today I'm grateful that my father took those photos of her and all the photos that he took in his life-- even the weird ones from the grocery store of the bunches of bananas, and even though he used to make me pose until I was bored to tears. Looking back at them now I understand how much of my history has been documented because of his little obsession, and I'm so thankful for it.

I'm also grateful for my mother, for the loving way in which she raised me, for letting me and my brothers take from her her youth so that we could grow up happy and fully cared for and complete. I'm so thankful to still have her as a powerful presence in my life, and I'm glad to call her my friend. I know even after she's gone I'll think of her everyday, and I'll look back at these pictures and pictures that we're taking even now and be able to remember her as a whole person, from the shy, pretty young woman to the mature, thoughtful mother, and everything in between.