Grandma and her Smile

I have been working on this project for way way to long. After my Grandma passed away last year she left behind a fabulous photo album filled with old photos dating as far back as 1910. I have been very very slowly scanning them into my computer to hopefully put together a book. This is one page that I have created. This blog entry is making me want to work on it again. The scanning process is so boring though.

I love looking at these pictures because they take me back to a time when I was not even close to existing, to a time when I get to see the old woman I loved so much as a young vibrant woman. I also just adore the style of the 30's. They feel like apple pie to me, warm, classic, and beautiful. A time when romance was alive, when people actually talked to one another, and men actually opened doors for you.

Photography is so awesome in this way. Freezing time forever. I imagine a time when these pictures were new to my Grandma. I imagine her excitement as she picked them up from the photo lab and showed them to her friends. They probably laughed over the stories the pictures represented and started planing another trip for next summer. Then maybe my Grandma put these pictures away for awhile and forgot about them. Then in her mid 60's, after life had carved some lines of time into her skin she dusted them off again. Now I imagine she looked at these pictures with a nostalgic remembrance of youth and adventure. Maybe she looked at these pictures and wondered where these friends were now, if they had kids of their own, and if they still looked the same. Then she probably looked at these pictures again at the very end of her life, at 99, and realized she has breathed more breaths than all of these figures in the pictures with her. That these pictures represent bodies that were now ghosts. I imagine her closing her eyes and going back to these moments, on a boat to Bermuda with her friends in 1935 when her skin was like porcelain and her body didn't ache...and smiling.

Now I look at these pictures and I remember a woman who took life as it came with unbelievable grace. She accepted hardships, reveled in the beauty, and smiled all the way through the whole thing. She was the happiest person I have ever met, even to the end when she had every reason not to be. I am glad she took these pictures, they make me remember the right way to live.

I wonder where all the pictures that we take today will end up? Will our grandchildren look at all them with wonderment of the past? Will I pick them up years from now and remember what it was like to be 29 and happy.