A Golden Summer

The MonoMonday theme this week is "Memories" -- I don't actually remember being this young, around 18 months old, but I can't help smiling back at myself.

I was born in a coastal town in Georgia, not far from the state border with Florida, nine months after my parents married. My father was 39 when I was born, 13 years older than my mother, and had a daughter from his previous marriage who turned 20 four months after I was born.  

From my perspective now, at 70, I think how strange the summer of 1948 must have been for my father, to have a toddler daughter playing outside the little house in Georgia where we lived, and in California, a 21-year-old daughter marrying in June. 

I certainly look content in this photo, and other similar ones from the same period that show me playing with my bucket, water, and sand in the yard. A few months later, in early November, I'd become a "big sister;" my parents had another daughter that month, and a third in 1955. 

I have his love of photography and singing, and look a bit like his mother. My father longed for a son. He took his own life at age 53, and never knew his three grandsons.

Blip 1864