Tag Archives: family photos

by Don't We Look Alike? | December 24, 2012 · 5:40 am

A Christmas Photo: 1959

In this photo, which was taken in my grandparents’ living room, I am four (almost 4 1/2). It is marked with the year 1958, but I believe it must be 1959 because a photo professionally printed with 1958 has my hair shorter. Also, my darker-haired cousin in this photo is a sitting-up baby, and he was born in December 1958. This goes to show that it’s important to be careful about assuming that notations on photos are correct, even if the handwriting looks old.

My pretty mother has her eyes closed from the big flash, and I am standing with an opened gift in my hands. I look a bit overwhelmed from the excitement and the unwinding of anticipation. My aunt is smiling at me and Grandpa looks at the photographer. The little boys are my uncle’s two oldest children–the youngest had not yet been born and neither had my brother. My aunt was still young and unmarried, a college student.

The photo details trigger memories. Since Grandma watched me while my parents worked (Grandma and the Purple People Eaters), this living room was very familiar to me. Note the television with family portraits on top. That’s the TV I watched Grandma’s soap opera with her on week days. A chair had been moved out to make room for the Christmas tree. My aunt and I had helped trim it. Tinsel strands had escaped from the tree and ground into Grandma’s hooked area rug. I liked to pick them up individually and run my fingers together down the smooth surface.

I could smell dinner in the kitchen. Ham and Grandma’s special roast beef. If only I hadn’t eaten so many sugar cookie snowmen decorated with little silver ball bearings and sprinkles. Grandma and I had made those two days before. She rolled the dough and I cut out the shapes. When they came out of the oven, I ate all the misshapen pieces.

Without the photo I wouldn’t remember specifics. I treasure the memories accessible through all my old photos and am grateful that I have them to look at whenever I wish. I have deep sympathy for those who have lost their mementos in disasters like Hurricane Sandy. My deepest sympathy and my prayers are with those who have lost their loved ones and only have the photos and memories left.

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If you wish to help the survivors of Sandy Hook, Newtown, this article lists some good ideas.

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Filed under Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tagged as Christmas, Christmas tree, Cooking, Creative Nonfiction, Family memories, family photos, Grandma, Grandpa, Memory, Old photographs, Television, Writing memoir

by Luanne | December 17, 2012 · 5:20 am

Twig

When I was ten, my father planted a Purple Leaf Plum twig in our backyard on Crockett Street. The roots fit in a coffee can. This plum sprig and I were the same height.

At least once a year, for five years, he took a photo of me standing next to the tree. The tree grew much more rapidly than I did. In some photos the tree was leafless, like an upside down rake, in others, the tension in its burgundy leaves apparent, and in at least one, the tree was in full pinkish-white bloom, the only beauty in our backyard.

Next to it, I looked unkempt, my bangs far too long, my hair shiny with oil, and raggedy clothes picked out of my costume trunk. Underneath these superficialities, the face was too thin which made the eyes and nose and mouth look overlarge and vulnerable–the face of a young teen trying to decide in which direction to run.

The plum tree stood in the center of our backyard because it needed full sunlight. After a heavy rainstorm, the tree’s branches hung to the ground in despair from the beating. I lifted the branches up off the wet grass. Next day the branches were directed skyward again.

We moved away from Crockett Street the summer before I entered tenth grade. Since it was in the backyard, I never saw the tree again. It now belonged to someone else. They say plum trees only live a generation or so, but sometimes a new trunk grows up next to the original and takes over, keeps on living. I like to think that’s what happened with our plum tree.

I don’t have the photos of me standing by the tree–only the memory and this one picture of my mother sitting in a lawn chair in front of the tree.

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Filed under Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tagged as Creative Nonfiction, Family memories, family photos, Memoir, Michigan, Nonfiction, Old photographs, Writing, Writing memoir

by Luanne | November 17, 2012 · 6:00 am

Lake Erie

by guest blogger Wilma Kahn

When I was small, the lake was an omnipresent feature in my life. Large, too large to see it all, it curved into the horizon, so we could view but one small portion of the enormous sloshing drop. Held in the embrace of fragile fingers of land lay tons of water, gallons of waves.

I early developed the notion that I was part of the lake or it a part of me. I have retained this feeling; and in fact, it has generalized to any large body of water—lake or sea. And I doubt that I am the only person who looks at Lake Michigan’s miraculous blue or the great grey Atlantic and says, “Mine.”

But back to my special lake, the dour, the grey-green, the shallow, the cloud-shrouded Erie. Lake Erie’s rocks are granite, quartz, and shale; its shells, snail and clam. Its sand is taupe, soft, nonabrasive; its bottom sand or clay; its seaweed velvety green, swaying in the rhythm of the waves.

How did I spend hours and hours outside as a child, fair with reddish hair, without being burned by the sun? Was it the Lake Erie clouds? Or that most of the time I romped in the waves, a freshwater dolphin, a creature of sea? I jumped through the swells in arc after arc, or swam underwater, eyes open, blowing a fine stream of bubbles through my nose and tickling the legs of my friends. We stood on our hands, wheeled through the blue, grabbed gobs of sand, threw them, or let them melt from our hands. We crawled back onto land only after our fingertips had shriveled and our lips turned blue. But on land we shivered and felt heavy as rocks, no longer warmed and buoyed by the lake.

The shore changed each year, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, sometimes rock, sometimes sand, sometimes clay. In years of clay, we children became potters, digging up the dark residue of prehistoric plants, rubbing it on our arms and legs, attracting snapping horseflies. We fashioned cups and bowls and ashtrays for our parents, those huge indolent creatures who sat and smoked while we made art and slapped flies.

Sometimes we built cities of sand along the shore, with houses, roads, bridges, and moats. Any house could have a pool—dig a few inches and the lake would well up, cool and pure. Stones, reeds, driftwood, sea glass, all lay close at hand for each architect’s use. I know the feel of hand smoothing sand, from crude heap to finished city. And at night, the tide would reclaim it all, suck it—sand, stick, and stone—into the watery matrix, roll it around, and spread it along the shore.

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Do you consider the place where you grew up a source–or the source–of your creativity?

Aerial view of Grand View Beach on Lake Erie

Wilma Kahn is a writer and writing teacher living in Southwest Michigan. She’s a water baby at heart.

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Filed under Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tagged as Creative Nonfiction, Family memories, family photos, Lake Erie, LaPlaisance Bay, LaSalle, Memoir, Michigan, Nonfiction, Writing, Writing memoir

by Luanne | November 6, 2012 · 4:55 am

For the Birds

I stand on a chair to reach my grandmother’s birdcage. My dress and petticoat flip out in back, as I balance on my palms, my sturdy toddler legs straining toward the parakeet. The parakeet contemplates my nose poking between the bars. I want it to sing. It’s all I want of this place, this apartment which rattles like death when the El rushes by. I think how much I miss my own home. Unless the bird will sing.

Maybe it’s something that happened to me even before I was born. I started reaching out for the word music with my baby fists, if only to rush them like a bottle to my mouth: “Little Miss Muffet”; “See You Later, Alligator”; “A Fairy Went a-Marketing.” I recited and sang them repetitively—until my mother screamed at me to stop. Even then, I slipped under the bed covers and sang “My bonnie lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea.” My breath billowed up the sheet.

Only a fifteen-year-old can make the leap from puppy love to bird lover. That’s what happened when I became fascinated with a boy with a bird’s name. My girlfriend and I followed him oh-so-subtly-and-cleverly in the halls, only running into him “by accident.” On the weekend I couldn’t wait for school to begin anew on Monday, so we went to the mall. Woolworth’s had a department with birds in birdcages. An arched cage so much like my grandmother’s parakeet cage held two lovebirds. I paid $9.99 for the lovers.

When my husband and I got married in an ice storm, we drove from the hotel reception in a burgundy Marquise Brougham with a prayer on the dashboard. Songbirds flew after us into the dark. That’s the way I remember it.

I sat in Grandma’s old oak rocker, holding my baby son in my arms, murmuring:

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d alone, bare-headed, barefoot

Whitman‘s poem managed something the others hadn’t been able to—it crept into my body, spreading out and occupying my flesh like a snakeskin it merely tolerated. I still can’t get rid of it. The poem and I battle inside like the gingham dog and the calico cat, but if it decided to leave, I’d be as empty as that snakeskin, discarded and colorless. It’s a poem about a he-bird who loves and loses the she-bird. Or it’s a poem about the curious boy who observes the bird and his troubles. But really it’s about a rocking like the surging of the sea and the hissing and whispering and all manner of delicious delicacies of words and rhythm.

When my parents put Grandma in the nursing home, she had to leave her parakeet behind. Not that yellow parakeet she had when I was a preschooler, but the green one she’d had since then. Dad brought the cage to our house and put it in the family room where the bird could watch TV. I kept changing the food and water, but the bird refused a single seed and died within a week.

Richard Siken told us wannabe poets never to write poems with birds in them. “It’s been done to death,” he said. I think he said that the bird as trope for poet was old after Whitman. Or maybe he said before Whitman. I went home and wrote a poem about Andersen’s Nightingale and the Chinese countryside and didn’t use the word bird. That’s what you call a writing constraint.

We had such a problem with roof rats and teenagers. The latter we knew would eventually move out. My husband called in the pest control people for the former. The man the company sent shuffled and mumbled, so we let him go about his business. That afternoon my son ran into the house yelling his head off, and since he’s a mild-mannered young man, I scrambled to get to him. He led me out to the back steps where three baby birds hung on a glue trap like Jesus and the thieves. We poured a sort of holy kitchen oil to release them. One had already died and a second stilled the instant it rested in my palm. The third one regarded me with one black eye, vibrant as a drop of ink. We hustled it to the veterinarian where the techs hustled it out of our sight.

My daughter writes songs that come out of her fully formed. I don’t know how anyone can do that, but then she sings them and her voice sounds like warm magma flowing. She sends me links to private songs on Myspace so I can listen before anyone else.

Over ten years ago cats started showing up at our house, looking for food and, later, shelter. We only had a couple of dogs left. The birds had departed long before for their heaven. Now the cats outnumber the humans, and they think they have an equal vote. They vote that anything with a fast heart rate can be considered prey. So no more birds for our family.

This house in Arizona has a tile roof, and the pigeons think it’s a rocky hillside, like their homes before humankind. While pigeons have those pleasing round breasts and iridescent feathers like abalone, they excrete their body weight every day—and always from the eaves above my exterior doors. I asked my neighbor to stop feeding the birds, but she doesn’t speak to humans. We put up screens to stop them from roosting in the obvious places. But a stubborn contingent stay put, and from my fireplace I hear them cooing. My brown striped cat purrs on the hearth, in rhythm with the pigeon coos.

A young pigeon dances on my patio, with his wings akimbo across his back, like a child stuck in a shirt he’s attempting to put on. Two adult pigeons watch from the roof. I put him in a brown bag and drive him to the pigeon lady. She has big man hands and examines him brusquely, but listens with her eyes closed, like a good doctor. She says, “I’ve never seen this before. It’s not a broken wing. He’s twisted his wings together across his back, like you twist a twisty on a bag.” She carefully and surely untwists his wings and puts them flat against his sides. “I’ll keep him for the winter and release him in the spring when he’s healthy.” I write a poem about the pigeon lady and through it she becomes a religious icon in my religion of one.

In the summer, I bring her another pigeon. This one acts odd, walking around the yard, but only flying a few feet at a time. She tries, but can’t save this one. “He had an illness, and I don’t know what it was.” She wants my permission to do an autopsy. That’s the way she learns how to take care of the living pigeons. When I hang up the phone, I can see through the window that another pigeon resting at the edge of eaves is breathing rhythmically as its body empties and fills and empties and fills in an unbroken pattern.

My grandmother outlived her parakeet in the nursing home for a year. I told my parents that if she had had the parakeet in her room, she and the parakeet would both have lived longer, but they explained that she died of uremia from renal failure. “The bird died because it didn’t eat, Luanne,” my mother said. “Stop trying to connect things that are not related.”

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Filed under Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Poetry

Tagged as Bird, Creative Nonfiction, Family memories, family photos, identity, Memoir, Nonfiction, Old photographs, Poem, Poet, Poetry, Richard Siken, Story, Writer, Writing, Writing memoir

by Luanne | October 24, 2012 · 7:56 pm

The Study of Faces

A face reflects differently under each new light. It seems to me that faces are holograms. To compare them with still photos or even other faces is a futile task. One day I look like one relative and my mother like a relative from another branch of the family. The next day someone will see my mother’s face in mine, although I look nothing like her aunt who seems to have cloned Mom.

Certain people think I am the female image of my father who, with his vaguely southern European looks, could never be confused with my mother’s Dutch relatives.

I didn’t start to think about faces and relationships until a day in 1976 when my grandparents entered the front door of my father’s store and I wandered up from the backroom to greet them.

Grandpa approached the glass case of men’s leather goods. “Here ta get me a wallet,” he said. “Got a good deal?”

Grandma smiled at me with her sparkly eyes and timid grin. “Hi, Lu.” She rolled out my name as if she didn’t want to stop saying it. “How is school?”

“It’s fine. I have an exam next week, though.” I grimaced and walked behind the case, slid open the door, and pulled out a wooden tray of $10 billfolds. I was a senior, a double major in marketing and history at WMU, the same school where my parents and grandmother before me had graduated. When Grandma attended, the big university had been a little teaching school.

Grandpa took hold of a Moroccan leather, stiff and durable as iron, with a surface like grains of sand. He examined the price tag, then opened it up and checked out the pockets.

I wished they had picked a different day to come in. My headache was paired with nausea because the night before Marshal and I had gone to a party and I’d gotten completely plastered. I hadn’t shampooed my hair that morning as I was running late and had to take the bus to work, so I’d pulled it back into a crocheted snood on the back of my head.

Handing me the first billfold he examined (“Ring this one up”), Grandpa looked down from his 6’1 height to peer into my face. His blue eye bored into me as he did so, while the blind green eye wavered uncertainly.

“Man alive. You look just like my mother.” He looked at me with more interest than usual. “I never saw that before.”

The person I’d grown up compared with was my mother, a pretty brown-haired, blue-eyed Jeanne Crain look-alike. I knew I wasn’t as pretty as she, but the association based on our hair and eye color was made often. When I was in kindergarten, she bought us matching baby blue and white gingham dresses. Her mother and sister wore dresses made from the same fabric, and the four of us went to the Mother-Daughter Banquet at the church downtown. We won a prize for our matching outfits, but I never believed that I looked like my mother.

Two weeks after Grandpa bought the wallet, I was at their house, examining a box of 75-year-old family photographs and glass negatives. Grandpa handed me a black and white professional portrait of his mother: blonde, austere. Not brown-haired me, the girl people said reminded them alternatively of Susan Dey, Barbie Benton-sans-bustline, and the anonymous girl in the new bra commercial (unfortunately, accentuating my flat chest). I said, “Oh, I don’t look like her.

Grandpa set another photograph in front of me; in this one, her hair isn’t pulled back as tightly. Now I could see it–the long slender neck and arms, narrow chest, and her face, tipped down and looking at her lap, is long with good bones and just short of being too ascetic or prairie-wife-ish. This could be me dressed in a stiff Victorian dress with puffy sleeves. Me sitting on the front steps of the brick house built by Cora’s father in his signature style, with the light brick line breaking up the dark brown exterior walls.

I felt as if I were seeing my own body from afar, objectively. We were both young and thin. I imagined her with the same blue veins at her translucent temples. Pretty enough, but not physical, a bit detached from the world.

It’s hard to believe that great-grandmother Cora was the woman who heard a man beating his horse in front of her house and rushed outside where she grabbed his whip and hit him with the handle. Or the woman who, besieged with leukemia which had begun a vicious attack on her mind, threw all the books in the house out the windows, then gathered them into a bonfire.

That day Grandpa hauled the box of photos and negatives out to my car, said that I should keep them for the family. I still pull out the images of Cora, to remind myself and to look for anything I’ve missed. Now I see that in the 2nd photo her dog Bobby is with her. In many of her pictures, she is with one or two of her dogs. There’s another similarity as I, too, spend a lot of time with my animals. I notice that she holds her body tightly, as a shield against the world. She appears more gentle than fragile.

Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t worry about my resemblance to an ancestor whose history and health seem plagued by problems. Now that I am the same age she was when she died, I realize things could have gone differently, that I have so far been spared much of what she endured.

I pull out another photo, one I haven’t noticed before. She’s standing near a shed in the yard, wearing an apron over her dress. Little bangs curl over her forehead, her hair certainly brown, and she’s smiling. Here, I see a diaphanous mask of my mother’s face floating across her-my features. Another slight shift of the hologram.