In looking through some pictures today, I found some scanned pictures that I had put into my photo program before I moved out of the house I had been living in, but had never really gotten around to sorting. When I was scrolling through these pictures (multiple scanned images per sheet) these six made me pause.
The pictures were excellent. Kind of lifestyle - you know, not the staged studio pictures. Most of my family pictures are like that, lifestyle I mean. Frozen in time.
What else do I love about these pictures? Look closely at the backgrounds. In the first picture (top row on the left) I see my grandparents back yard with the door that was there for nearly all of my life. In the rest of the pictures I see a park that no longer exists, but provided hours of magical entertainment not only for my cousins but also for my sister and me. I love that the park was captured in these pictures. The city updated it, it had been unsafe, and when they updated it they tore down all of the old playground (metal slide, wooden platform, concrete tunnels) and replaced it with plastic. I didn't have any pictures of the place that had been so magical to me and my sister. It was there where we had made playground friends, acquired more than one war injury, and allowed our imaginations to run wild.
The more I look at this accidental photo collage the more I love it. One of my cousins has passed away. The other is nearly forty years old. What a beautiful way to capture these moments in their lives.