Sliding

My husband and I have been sliding.  Not on ice, but that’s also possible up here on “the mountain”, where we still have snow on the ground.  No, our sliding is sorting, scanning and naming hundreds of slides my Dad took between 1957 and the mid-eighties.  We have a huge bag full of rejects.  I hate to throw any of them away, but I decided not to scan those that are landscapes, sunrises, sunsets or are of people who aren’t relatives.  There were lots of those.  There were 50 slides marked “PeeWees”.  I couldn’t identify a single person in them.  Out they went. 

My Mom and her sister, Carol

Mom and Dad

But there are also hundreds, 600 plus so far, that we’ve scanned.  It has been a real journey down memory lane looking at this memoir on film, showing what my Dad felt was important to chronicle.  He took pictures of his dogs, all trained to hunt, and of the fish he caught, big salmon and good-sized Rainbow trout.  He took pictures of the flowers he planted, red, yellow and pink rhododendrons and pink dogwood.   There were uncountable images of beautiful sunsets and sunrises, of the rivers he fished and mountains he hiked.  But his most photographed subject was Mom.  We see her in beautiful pink, red and sapphire blue dresses, dressed for special occasions.  She stands in pastel pants and sun hats in front of the Capitol Building in D.C., in front of the Lincoln Memorial, standing with Mount Rushmore in the distance.  She is seen next to rivers, next to campfires, in Disneyland, in Hawaii, on the golf course.  She emerges from a lake in a brilliantly red swimming suit.  She stands with her cousin “Abe” in numerous shots, always wearing a jaunty hat.  She poses in her “daffodil” hat and orange and yellow print dress on Easter.  She sings, with her hair piled on her head, in The Puget Soundsters.  She is caught sleeping on the couch and sunning on a lawn chair.  Dad obviously loved and wanted to capture the image of his wife.  

Chris dressed up for a dance

My memories spark when I see the pictures of me and my brother, Dan, as young kids and teenagers.  We were sitting in front of the Christmas Tree cozy and warm, and then around a campfire, watching our shoes and socks dry, hypnotized by the flames, our eyes watering from the smoke.  There are pictures of us in fancy Easter outfits, graduation gowns, dressed formally for proms.  As the years passed I appeared with my two daughters, pictures of Dan with a huge beard, my little brother Stanley growing up, from baby in a walker to gawky teenager to a young man heading off to the Army.  My first and second husbands appear, as do many pictures of my third child, Christopher, as a baby.  All my kids are babies again, in pictures I forgot were taken.  I have long hair for a long time, then short hair.  I look tired or energetic, happy or moody—moments in time, mere seconds in a history.

I’ve also gotten to see my Aunts and Uncles and my Grandmas and Grandpas again.  All of them are gone now and Mom and Dad, too. It’s wonderful to see my parents again in their forties and fifties when they were traveling and camping and had tons of energy for fishing and swimming.  My grandparents were old already in these pictures, but I can feel the sweet affection I had for them when I look at their worn faces in these photos. 

My Grandma and Grandpa Ammons

I’m so glad for all these pictures my Dad took.  Mom took photos, too, but she printed hers and they are in the albums that I’ve pored over for years.  The ones from Dad were hidden away for decades.  He’d show them to us, via the slide projector and the screen, the canisters jamming sometimes and Dad narrating in detail. Then they’d be put back in a box in the closet.  I unearthed them when I cleaned Mom’s house out after she died.  They are a treasure, one that will be my most prized gift of the Christmas of 2012.