The Minnesota Farm Woman

After my mother died, I inherited the large dresser that was in her bedroom for many years. I also inherited all the family photos, and there are boxes of them from both my mother’s and my father’s side of the family. It was not that my sister didn’t want them, but I have more storage room than she does, namely, the large dresser. All of the drawers are filled with loose photographs and albums of even more photographs as well as documents and scrapbooks. Even though I reminded my mom to write on the back of these photos so we would know who they were when we went though them someday, she didn’t. I guess that maybe the project was a little too overwhelming for her, but someday is here already, and it came sooner than we all expected it to. I wanted to make it my winter project to go through and clean out those drawers, but time got away from me and I didn’t get a lot done. It’s not that I’m lazy. I just don’t like to be cold, and spend most of those dark winter evenings under my electric blanket watching old movies and House Hunters episodes featuring Caribbean beach homes. Yesterday, there was finally a hint of spring in the air, and after a walk in the sunshine with Barney the Chihuahua, who also spent the winter under the electric blanket, I pulled out the first drawer and got started. After looking through Mom’s collection of childhood valentines from the 1930’s, I sorted the mixed-up photographs into piles and decided that I would harden my heart and toss in the trash anyone we didn’t know, was unfocused, or any landscape pictures of unknown places. You can probably guess what happened. I was transported back to bygone days. My mother and her sister Olive were young and beautiful in the early 1940’s and looked so carefree, despite the fact that there was a war going on and the world was a very serious place. Thrown into the mix were photos of our toddler grandson as a newborn, my daughter and nephew with silly grins on their faces sitting in Dad’s old boat, and my beautiful baby niece who was born prematurely and lived only a few short months. I studied the face of the grandmother I never knew to see if there was a hint of any of them in her smile or in her eyes. I found assorted posed family Christmas pictures, and a favorite first-day-of-school picture with half of the neighborhood kids standing on our front steps, dressed in our finest first-day-of-school clothes. I can still hear my mom asking us to say “cheese” while trying to squeeze us all into the picture and it looks like I may have been rolling my teenage eyes behind some very groovy glasses. Before I knew it, the afternoon had disappeared and I had only emptied out the first drawer. There’s five more to go, as well as my own boxes of photographs. I haven’t written on the back of any of them yet, but I’ll get to it….someday.

Read Full Post »