One of the few

Very few photos of me exist from my childhood. I am the third child in my family. Like many families, there are a huge number of photos of the first born, somewhat fewer of the second born, and by the time the third kid comes around, the whole wonder of childhood is not quite as astounding.

 

My husband and I displayed photos from our childhood at our wedding, partially because of our eleven year age difference. Juxtaposing a photo of me  on my first day of kindergarten with one of my husband studying for his SAT’s seemed very amusing to us.

 

My parents ( unlike me) were terribly tidy people. After the wedding, they inadvertently tossed the manila envelope filled with my childhood photographs.

 

I once mentioned this loss to my friend Esther Hautzig who was a Holocaust survivor.  Poor Esther was so completely horrified about the loss of images of my childhood that I felt sorry that I had told her.   Esther then told me the heartbreaking story of one of her cousins who had survived but not one image of her as a child survived the war, and how the loss of the images just compounded the loss of family and friends. My photos may have been lost, but the people in the photos were all alive and well. Occasionally, an old photo appears, like this one.

This photo surviving photo of me was taken the August when I was 10.  My sister took this photo with her brownie box camera. This was taken the first summer we had planted sunflowers in our garden.

 

I loved that I was wearing a skirt and a t-shirt that belonged to  my older sister. I had always worn hand me downs. This was the first time that I was actually sharing clothing with her.

You can see our neighbor’s lovely 1920’s home behind their fence.  our house was a more pared down post war house.

 

I loved the gracious details, like the wide windows you can see in the photos that you got by living in an old house.

 

About a month or so after this photo was taken we cut off the sunflower blossom and harvested the seeds.  We all loved  munching on sunflower seeds. My oldest sister loved eating salted pumpkin seeds that she would buy in a box in the candy store.

If you imagine a baseball cap on my face you will see what my older son looked like at the same age.