Down on the Farm

This photo has hung on my wall for many years. I found it amongst the family archives decades ago and thought it was so charming that I had it properly framed even though I'm not really sure who any of these people are. I believe that they are my mother's family and chose this picture for today's journal entry because it is such a perfect counterpoint to Monday's picture of my paternal grandparents.

My father's family were highly educated (including the women...my grandmother graduated from the University of California in 1899) and kept boxes of family records, photographs and letters.  My mother came  from farm stock who migrated West  from someplace in Ohio. She grew up on a prune ranch in the Willamette Valley near Salem, Oregon. My mother was the youngest of six children. The eldest, her sister Elberta, a nurse, died of Spanish influenza, in 1918. It was a struggle to earn a living and the family often thought of selling, but the year someone made a handsome offer (accompanied by a 'suitcase of cash') for the ranch, they turned it down because a bumper crop was developing . Soon after that an unseasonably bad storm wiped out the entire crop. I never knew either of my maternal grandparents, although I was named for my grandmother, Jennie Finley.

Very few 'things' remain from my mother's family. There are no books or pictures, dishes or furniture. But this picture is of people who look like they are having a good time. The women are  pretty, the men look casual and boyish, and many of them are actually smiling. The old lady in the back seat looks a bit formidable but, hey, she joined the party. No social distancing in this group. And don't you love that cap on the boy at bottom left? I don't know where in that surrey with the fringe on top there was room for a picnic (or all those people), but one can't help feeling that a picnic was the occasion for this family picture.  I also love the fringed fly coat on the horse, or probably two horses though it is difficult to sort out the seven legs....

While Monday's picture was all about the 'things' and my personal knowledge of the the stories behind them, this picture is about the people and the fact that I can make up stories about them because I really don't know anything about them....