Another photo of me and my dad that I found in the 25 year old crumpled paper lunch bag. Although I don’t remember this photo being taken, I do remember living here as well as some snippets of childhood for which this small house on Telegraph Road was the setting.

On a summer day, it’s me, age five, hamming it up while sitting on my dad’s lap in the front yard of our house that we rented from his Aunt Hazel. I don’t remember the occasion, but it looks like a gathering of my parents’ square dancing friends…maybe a game of poker is going on up there on the front porch. I don’t know why I’m pointing at my dad’s nose…just part of the mugging process and me being me, I guess. What I do know is that my mother made that polka dot sun suit and she made it out of a feed sack. (I wore a-la-feed-sack fashions well into my elementary school years.) I was okay with the skimpy homemade outfits until the following summer when I was suddenly stricken with modesty and refused to wear them altogether. And my flair doesn’t end there. I’m also donning my mother’s signature haircut for me…short. choppy. bangs. These days I cut my own hair and have a tendency toward short. choppy. bangs.

I see my dad’s wedding ring there that is now weighty, yet gently so, on my finger, kept secure by my own wedding band. My mother gave it to me after my father’s passing, and I slipped it on for the meantime so I wouldn’t lose it. I’ve yet to take it off. I’m glad that she gave me his original plain band and not the other one. At one point she bought a second set of wedding bands, ones with beaded edges. I asked her the reason for the new set of rings—had the originals been lost or were vows renewed—no, she said, she just wanted new ones. Odd, I think, to “replace” something like that.

And it was in this house where this photo was taken.