Old Photos

I am in my home town of Thief River Falls right now. I came here on Sunday evening so I could say "Happy Father's Day" in person to my dad. We spent some of yesterday afternoon going through my Grandma Ethel's pictures. Grandma died just last fall. We found that her framed pictures usually had another picture or two layered behind the one was being displayed so every frame had to be checked. Sometimes it would be layers of pictures with the same great-grandchild so you can see him or her growing in the sequence of school pictures. Of course the photo albums and boxes of pictures spanned 4 or 5 generations. Some of the cars and scenes were right out of a Grapes of Wrath movie set or a Bonnie and Clyde wardrobe. Grandma and Grandpa had lived, traveled and worked out west so there were pictures from oil fields and the California fruit crops. Usually we would look at pictures of relatives and look for physical resemblances. My mom says she kept pictures of really good looking men and women even if she didn't know who they were just so we could say we had good looking genes to draw from. You gotta find hope where you can! We also found some photos of men in uniform (at least one form WW1)and some WW2 rank insignia and campaign ribbons, dog tags and what we think was a silver star but no way to sort out which items belong to whom. Story lost! They say a picture is worth a thousand words" but that's only half the story. There are stories that go with the pictures. As my mother or my aunt told a story I kept thinking or saying "write it down." It was a good afternoon.