Here are two photos that I think my aunt Jane gave me a few years before she died.

I don’t know who took them, but I believe I can roughly date them.

The first one is of my mother as a teenager.

I’m guessing she must have been about fifteen years old when it was taken. Does that sound about right? If so, then it dates from about 1939.

I further presume she’s standing in front of the house where her family was living at the time, which I believe was somewhere on Chestnut Street in Richland, if I recall correctly what she told me about the houses she lived in.

In just four years in 1943 she and my father would get married, so it’s quite possible they had already met by this time. They used to go to the movies at the Neptune Theatre and afterwards go to Irvin Wolfskill’s Sugar Bowl. Perhaps they saw The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind together that year.

I never remember seeing her wear her hair in that kind of style. She always had shorter hair, or if it was longer, she would wear it in a style where it was piled up on her head. So I always associate that style of hair in the photo with the 30s or 40s.

The other photo is of my sister Donna and me and our cousin Connie.

That’s me holding Connie. She looks to be about one year old, so that means this photo was taken in 1962. I would have been thirteen and Donna would have been about eight, depending just when it was taken.

That’s the backyard of our home on West Main Street in Richland. We’re sitting on the dividing curb between our yard (in the foreground) and the neighbor’s yard. By this time our next door neighbors would have been the Dieffenbachs.

Connie looks pretty happy, and Donna looks content, but what the hell is that expression on my face? As the saying goes, I look like the cat that swallowed the canary.

Feel free to add a caption.