After my father retired, he and my mother collaborated on a dollhouse. It is a magical creation that displays their most excellent skills.
I just lost my mother on Valentine's Day and my Dad has been gone for 18 years. This dollhouse now belongs to one of my nieces, who has three young daughters to share it with.
More from the family photo archives: a living room gathering of my Dad's cousin, my Dad, and my brother, probably taken in 1950 or 1951. The biggest clue: the radio is still prominent (directly behind my Dad), and there is no sign of the television which came very soon after this.
My Mother says the drapes were made of beautiful tobacco-leaf-print barkcloth. The chair that my uncle is sitting in was turquoise and the couch (not seen) was a soft gray-green.
There are lots of storytellers in my family, and when my Dad and his cousin Buddo got together--as they did often during my childhood--they were two of the best.
Today would have been my Dad's 92nd birthday, but he's been gone for nearly 18 years. I lost Uncle George, my Mom's brother, earlier this month; he was born the same year as my Dad.
In the wake of Uncle George's passing, I have been doing a lot of genealogical research into the wee hours, placing pieces of the puzzle into my family tree.
I would encourage you to conduct an oral history interview with all of your loved ones, especially the old-timers. Vast amounts of knowledge are lost when one of them passes; putting their recollections down on paper or (even better) in their own voice will provide an invaluable record.
My Mom's older sister had a faint recollection of the name of a small town in Germany that she had heard the elders mention. That bit of information led to my finding one of our great-great-grandmothers. (My Mother is two-and-a-half years younger than her sister, and did not recall this vital clue.)
I'm in the middle of another family mystery as I write this and am waiting to hear from the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh with some details about a great-grandfather. One of my aunts provided a clue that (knock on wood) has enabled us to identify him.
So, Happy Birthday, Daddy! Farewell, Uncle George! I can hear them now, swapping stories behind the pearly gates.
My two older brothers and I with our Easter baskets. The Easter Bunny--er, my Dad--is snoozing through it all.... The photo was taken by my Mom.
Happy Easter!
My youngest sister sent this photo to me yesterday. It is one that I had never seen, possibly from my uncle's estate originally, and dates to the mid- to late-1940's.
She included the following anonymous quotation along with the picture:
"My father's guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever."
Missing you still, Daddy, and honoring your memory.
Remembering my Dad this week.... I love this photo that my Mom took of my Dad and my sister sharing a joyful moment in the summer of 1957.
I lost my father to an accident seventeen years ago today. In the aftermath of his loss, an elderly friend of mine, a poet who had only known my Dad through my sister and me, wrote a moving tribute to him. I'm including it here; it was written by my late friend, Mary Ellen Gallagher (Drumdaughter), whom I sorely miss as well.
♥
On the last full day of his life
he climbed a tree.
What, you ask, was a seventy-four
year old man doing
climbing a tree?
Perhaps the bright autumn woods
made him feel a boy again
and he longed to be held in leafy arms,
gaze once more on his beloved fields,
and touch the wild September sky.
In numinous response to leaves
and sun and apple-scented air
he moved old aching bones up to the tree top
and started his journey away from
minds which look askance at old men in trees.
I could only wish to climb a tree
on the last full day of my life.
My father passed away sixteen years ago this week and the unfathomable pain of his loss has only slightly lessened for me. I love this photo of my Dad, taken in our backyard by anthropologist and photographer Frances M. Cox, a now-deceased friend of my parents. He is tying flies to use when fly fishing for trout, one of his favorite pastimes.
He was an unself-consciously creative man. One of my earliest memories of his expression of that natural creativity is his crafting an archery bow from scratch with laminated colorful woods. I was a pre-schooler and was fascinated by the steaming of the wood and its taking shape in the custom form he built. He made the arrows, too.
Years later, for my youngest sister's wedding reception, he and my mother hand-gathered grapevine and he wove an oversized fruit basket to grace the dessert table. I come by my love of crafts and handwork honestly. My mother is no slouch in these areas, either! More about her in an upcoming post.
The Dog Days of Summer are here, although it has been quite comfortable here in Southern California lately. Nothing says summer to me in such a playful way as a riotous sunflower bloom.
This one was part of a thickly planted patch in a local neighborhood that I spied while driving by. I could not resist stopping and documenting its beauty. If you look closely you can see a few bees enjoying its nectar.
During the last summer of my Dad's life (1991), he grew a spectacular sunflower in his garden in Pennsylvania which was easily twice the diameter of the center of this bloom (perhaps 12 inches to this one's 6). We had given him the seeds in the spring and he nurtured his prize with his secret fertilizer--gray water from the kitchen dishpan.
A few days after his untimely accidental death that September, we harvested the sunflower and kept the seeds. My sister fashioned a wire-wrapped charm bracelet for me that included one of the seeds.
My father reveled in nature and it is poignant to me that this last triumph in his garden yielded hollow seed-shells. That sunflower would not be replicated--an irony not lost on his children and family, who still feel his loss, but are uplifted and reminded of him when a sunflower shows its joyous face.
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