This is a favorite picture of my family. There are girls standing in an archway between rooms. Very period dressed for the mid to late 1950s. The tallest girl is my aunt Connie. The two girls closest to her are two of my other aunts, and the blonde at the end is likely a cousin.

It is the two figures seated that draw me most into this picture. The woman is my grandmother, Beatrice. And the little girl is my mother, Jennie. I never got to meet my grandma, so when my mom got this picture about 20 years ago it was so neat to see my grandma in such a candid pose. And of course to see my mom as a tiny little girl was pretty neat, too, as there weren’t many pictures of her in early childhood before her mom died. This is only the second picture I’ve seen of her as a small child.

I look at this picture and wonder who my mom and grandma were looking at. Who was just off to the right making grandma smile. Was it my grandpa behind the camera? So many questions. No answers to these questions, but it is nice to see a snapshot of my family well before I was born.