A friend who read my memoir said recently, “I wanted to see pictures of your mom.”
Ginny had one of those Brownie cameras, and even though the family was far from prosperous, somehow she got enough film to take photo after photo of herself and her friends. I have pictures of Ginny posing on cars, on porches, standing in the yard, usually in shorts or a swimsuit. She wasn’t repressed. But she didn’t like pictures of herself when she was older.
Do any of us like to look at photos of ourselves getting uglier? I’ll just put it out there: for most of us aging = getting ugly. It wasn’t meant to be that way. God created human bodies to be glorious and permanent. Our first parents Adam and Eve left their Creator, and the glory departed. For most of us humans, youth = health = beauty. For a select few of us the beauty remains after a certain age, and usually only with singular focus and no small sum of cash.
So I’ve chosen a few photos of Mom when she was healthy, ones I know she wouldn’t mind sharing with the world. This is how I like to remember her anyway. Maybe you can imagine her as the Ginny who rocked little four-year-old Susan in the blue rocking chair, who took me fishing and cooked the fish, who bought my family three flats of strawberries just to see how many we’d eat.
Which pictures would you like your loved ones to call to mind, when they remember you?
