OPENING SEQUENCE IN BLACK AND WHITE

Recently my cousin sent me a few photos taken a long time ago during a visit her family made to my family’s farm.

This was one of them.  That’s me in braids trying to hide in the flowers by our house.

This reminded me of other photos which came into my hands after the death of my parents.  Funny how the world seemed to change from black and white to colors about the same time Dorothy landed in OZ.  I know these photos were taken well after 1939. (I’m not THAT old!) But they have the same eerie quality of a time so totally removed from the fast-paced flashy world of today.

Baby Me dressed in my sunbonnet and yet still squinting in the bright light.  I’m stashed in the high chair which survived all four children before giving up the ghost.

Farm cats had to be tough.  Not only did they have to endure a rugged outdoor life, but there were those sticky kids who didn’t know the difference between hugging and choking.

My mom was a farm wife.  She didn’t have time to take a lot of pictures, but there seemed to be one every year of us in our Easter outfits.  This is me in a dress.  I remember it well.  Mom sewed it and added a store-bought belt to make it extra cool.  It’s one photo of me in a dress where I didn’t have a big bandage on one or both of my knees.  That’s my older brother looking very Indiana Jones in his fedora.

Here I’m wearing a hat and jacket that used to belong to my big brother.  I’m sitting on a Flexible Flyer sled like you’d expect to see in “A Christmas Story.”  It was an evil sled.  I have one of those memories which runs like a movie trailer in my mind. It involves propping that sled at an angle against a stack of wood.  My plan was to turn the sled into a short slippery slide.  It was an okay plan except there was nail that had worked itself loose enough to rip through the seat of my jeans and me.  Hurt so bad I could hardly breathe.  I still have a scar.

Not a very good ending.  Well, here is a sweet photo of Mom and me.