This week’s events reminded me of this picture of my mother taken right after her wisdom teeth were removed. Hers were infected and she immediately adorned black eyes and intolerable pain after the surgery. I hadn’t seen this picture in years, but I remembered it vividly while in that dentist’s chair.
This photo, along with countless mementos, have been in storage in a friend’s attic since college. I called that friend yesterday and picked up a whole car full of treasures. Creative writing portfolios, sweaters, books, my mother’s thirty-year old photo albums.
I figured I’d show you some of my favorite keepsakes and pictures. If you’d like to see the full version of each photo, you can find them here.
So let’s see what I found.
This is a wooden turtle, carved by my first long-term boyfriend Zak while he was away at boyscout camp:
A ticket stub to one of my first concerts:
My high school ring (on the left), and my mother’s:
I love this most. A valentine from my grandparents from over a decade ago. The answer is Yes:
As for the photos, they’re fantastic. To see my grandparents as children and my parents as teenagers made my week, my month even. I can’t get over how gorgeous my mother is, and my grandmother; how happy my father was, how tiny my sister is in my grandparent’s arms.
Here is my mother through grade school (nice glasses, Mama):
Here she is at about 17, working at Friendly’s — where she met my father:
These are photos of my paternal grandparents with my father and Aunt Karen, circa 1950’s:
My grandmother was a knockout. And I love that photo of the four of them. It’s so Leave it to Beaver.
These photos of my maternal grandmother shocked me. Look at how young she was! That’s her with her doll as a little girl. The babies in the pictures are my mother. And on the bottom right is my great-grandmother, whom we called Mémère.
My mother is the eldest of four:
I found this photo of my parents at their wedding:
And a rare shot of my maternal grandfather. I don’t ever remember him looking this healthy. He died when I was very young after years of battling illness:
My mother was quite the hippie chick back in her day. And she was stunningly beautiful. The photo on the top left is my mother and father and little Carrie-Lynn in the belly. Below that is my Aunt Karen holding my sister.
And my dad, how I remember him when I was very little:
This one shows my mother’s first car, an orange VW Rabbit, and my father’s 1970 Chevy truck with the horse on the hood. I remember a million memories lived out in those vehicles.
I especially like this photo of my dad giving my mama a graduation card when she finished high school. The Beatles haircut makes the photo:
I’m pretty sure my father would still have that belt. He never throws anything away.
Here is life after Carrie-Lynn. She was the second grandchild, and the first girl in the family. My mother was twenty-two years old, and my father, twenty-nine. There are not many photos of me in the albums since I was not yet born, but that is me on the bottom — the little peanut in the pool:
We are in my grandparent’s backyard in the photo, and again, my mother’s beauty knocks me off my feet:
Although I am not in the albums, I do have a handful of baby photos of myself. My favorite is the top right picture of me sleeping in my crib. My mother said I always slept this way, and I think I continued to sleep with my feet off of the bed until a friend told me during a sleepover that their could be ghosts under the bed and you should not sleep this way.
And what will our babies look like? Here are some photos of Sean as a wee boy:
My Father-In-Law is always on the hunt to find baby photos of Sean to give me because he knows how much I love them. He handed me a handful of baby Sean photos last weekend. This one is probably my favorite:
We were a very tight family growing up in the world of film cameras. I can’t help but think about the size of the photo collection my child will grow up to have, and I hope that it brings as much joy that baby photos bring to my life. Maybe you can have too many pictures, too many moments captured in time. But for me, who doesn’t have many memories to look back on, I feel like the luckiest woman in the world when I come across old photographs.
These literally took my breath away.
