Smoked Fish for 44 Cents and Cherry Juice for a Quarter

Feb 7

Written By

Another Saturday spent sorting through pictures and odds and ends, trying to figure out what to keep and what would hurt too much to throw out. For a family that I thought was poorly photo-documented I feel as though I suddenly have a ton of pictures. I sort through them, throwing out ones of people that I don't know, but am still left with a chunk of my sisters' childhoods and a good bit of mine sitting in a dusty box. So I'll scan some and put the rest away in boxes....and leave them for the boys to sort through someday? They'll look at them and try to decide if the baby pictures are of me or Judi, and wonder who the other people are. The little glimpses of my family's life when I was young, and even from when before I was born....those won't speak to them they way they do to me. And yet...I can't bear to throw them in the trash.

Debbie in our backyard. I don't even remember the yard looking like that...so bare, without trees....

And here's my Dad, perhaps getting the beach umbrella ready? I look at that picture of my grandmother and I can just smell her. She smelled so good. She had a cloth bag that she took to the beach instead of a purse and I took it when we closed up their house. I could still smell her for a long time but it finally faded away.

I know I could scan them and then throw them out, but handling these photos speaks to me in way a scan can't. I love the scans but the actual photo, the size, the finishing, what pictures are on top or below it, the wear and the dust....all those things say more to me than a scan can.

So here I sit, with my stacks of old photographs.

It's not just the photographs though. On my bedside table has been sitting a little notebook that I found when we were digging through Judi's things. It's a journal of somebody's vacation in 1939. Some nights before I go to bed I read a page or two about one of their days and I want desperately to go rent a cabin for 3 dollars and buy a 1/2 gallon of cherry juice for a quarter, and peaches for 15 cents.

I scanned it. I suppose I could get rid of it. But you know me. I'll keep it and put it next to my boxes of photos. Sometimes I wish objects didn't speak to me so loudly but for better or worse they do, and I don't know how not to listen.