My mother sat an old box down in front of me, told me I could have what I wanted of it’s contents. I opened it and faces stared back at me. Oddly familiar faces, but ones I’d never seen in my lifetime.
My father was a very private person, almost to a fault. He never shared his life with us, his childhood, his past. He was evasive with his answers to our questions. We never met our family on his side, no grandparents, no uncles, no cousins.
This box contained pictures of his family. His younger brother, his only sibling. His mother. His father. The haunting pictures of his grandparents, my great grandparents...her picture lined with her hair. Hair, hair that I have a physical connection to. What I am made of is also in that 100 year old hair. These people lived and without their lives I would not be. But I don’t know them, I don’t know what their lives were like. My father was born in the middle of the depression, but all the pictures were full of happiness. I only really remember my father as an older man, he was approaching 50 when I was born, but seeing pictures of him as a young adult looking almost Hollywood handsome. These pictures are amazing.
I feel like I’ve gotten to know my father in a much more intimate way than I did in his lifetime, unfortunately for me. I will never know many things, like what took him to Ireland, what led him to teach college level agronomy, they whys of many of the things he did in his lifetime. But I know, even with all his aloofness, that he loved my brother and I. As much as I remember some of the words said in anger I will equally now remember the little things kept hidden away; a poem written by myself as a teenager, cards made by children’s hands, the menus my brother and I made for our bake shop (we sold my parents little cakes made in my Holly Hobbie oven; we were ever the entrepreneurs) and now these pictures. These things were important to him, as I now know we were. Unfortunate that we couldn’t know these things about him in his lifetime.

I’m enjoying these pictures, though. Seeing glimpses of the person he was before he was our father. Half the pictures don’t have anything on the back or any indication who the people are in the picture; this is why I will place the ones we do know in our scrapbook. I want to make sure my kids know who these people are even if I didn’t.