Family Pictures

Dave takes a few last photos at his dad's place, standing on the dumpster that they filled as they cleaned out the place. 

I took this photo from the car window in the driveway just as we left at 8:30 p.m.

Dave's grandmother Mamere wrote this label on a roll of negatives: "Vermont '56 family pictures John in summer uniform excellent!"

Dave was a baby once, a long time ago.  The first boy, his parents took approximately sixty thousand photos of everything he did. (This one looks like that because I was scanning it from some negatives.

In fact, that was my job this trip, sitting and scanning slides and negatives, because I hurt my knee--stepping up onto a stair with an unusual height--on the very first day we arrived. No matter. Dave's dad had about 10,000 slides, boxes and boxes of them, mostly from his time as a history professor when he used them for lectures. Still, there were about another few thousand slides that were personal, as well as the negatives from photos he took going back to the early 60s and family photos on negatives like the one Mamere wrote on above.)

Dave's dad took so many photos of him, it was funny.  Dave's sister remarked on it that there were hardly any of her because she was the second child.  Maybe.  Even after she arrived, the photos of Dave out number the photos of her by about ten to one. 

Such is her personality, I told Dave that if the situation were reversed, she would comment continuously on it, "There are so many more photos of me than you! I wonder why! I wonder why they wouldn't take as many photos of you as they did of me! So strange!"

Family. 

Goodbye, Dick

 

This is Dave's mom Luann and dad Dick's engagement photo, taken around 1968, I think.   Both are gone now. 

We've been in Montana, clearing out Dave's dad house so it can be put on the market. 

He loved history, books, guns, scissors, fly fishing, photography... so many things. 

This is the view from his kitchen table. 

Lovely. 

Godspeed, Dick. 

No Time

My mother fell and broke her arm Monday before last and has been staying with us on and off since then. (She stayed last weekend with my aunt.) She has surgery tomorrow to fix the break and then she'll stay with my aunt for awhile. She hopes to go back to her apartment after that. 

We are still really missing Gray Kitty. He was our constant companion for the last fifteen years, coming to live with us as a four-year-old stray. He was such a good cat. We talked to Carrie, the woman who stayed with Gray Kitty while we were in Florida. She is a very talented artist and is going to do a portrait of Gray Kitty for us. Kelly and Kevin are in Italy but they sent some very lovely flowers. Dave's sister Sara sent us a copy of Judith Viorst's book The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. 

So much is going on right now. There's not any time to rest and grieve. 

As part of getting ready to clear out Dave's father's house, we bought a slide scanner. To test it out, we scanned a bunch of slides of work that I did over twenty years ago. I haven't looked at photos of my work from that time in decades. I was surprised at some of it. Some was very good. Some was very pretentious. There were a few that I have absolutely no recollection of, despite having spent hours and hours making it. 

Very strange. 

 

 

Saying Goodbye to Gray Kitty

With great sadness we say goodbye to our Gray Kitty today. It was a joy and an honor to have had him share his life with us. 

A devastating day.

Six Days

May 20th:

 Not sure where the days go, but they go. What have i been up to? 

I've been doing some sewing. I bought a book on sewing clothes without patterns and I actually made a shirt, but it is comically large because I am not great at taking my own measurements so I just guessed and ended up with a Dolan sleeved shirt sewn from rectangles that is 40 inches across. I used cheap white muslin to make it (didn't want to spend much money on an experiment) and when I tried on the shirt, it so reminded me of the boxy white scrub tops I had to wear during nursing school that I was disgusted. I took it off and haven't touched it again. 

I never wrote much about nursing school, how much I hated it, because when I was in the midst of it the stress was so awful that I was having heart palpitations and more than one ended up in the ER. When I was done with school I just wanted to be done, to put it behind me and never think about it again. I wanted to burn my uniforms, but I settled for throwing them in the garbage. 

So when I put on the huge, boxy white shirt I had just sewn and I looked in the mirror and saw the huge, boxy white scrub top staring back at me, I was done.  I still want to sew clothes, but I don't think I'll ever again use white muslin or sew any boxy tops.

May 26:

Some excitement yesterday after my mother fell and broke her arm. The doctor set it in the emergency room but she has instructions to follow up with orthopedics. They can see her on Friday. She stayed with us last night and will again tonight. 

Today Gray Kitty has to go to the vet.  He has ascites, fluid build up in his abdomen and chest. They don't know the cause yet, but they took x-rays and did labs to try to determine the cause and how to treat it, but for now we are just to help him stay comfortable. 

Dave and I are out running errands. We went by the walmart pharmacy and now we're at the grocery store. 

It's stormy weather, raining and thundering right now.  I stayed in the car because this weather makes my head feel not great. (Migraine headache medication sales go up during storms, so I don't think it's just me.)