Cincinnati it must have been after I left home for college.
Here is my father's mother, a portrait painted well before the turn of the century.
My father long before I knew him, in the thirties.
And my mother in the same time period.
This is getting closer to when children started to come along. Only a couple years till my sister made her debut.
My father and me, when I was two years old.
A bit later, he taught me to paddle a canoe and was delighted, then, to be able to recline while I
did the work.
After the war years in Washington DC, my father worked for the Federal Reserve Bank.
My father died suddenly in his seventies. At the time this seemed like a very old age, but my perspective
is changing. My mother lived much longer than she intended, and her later years were a long, slow decline
that was painful for all concerned. Through all of it, however, she retained a sense of humor and of family.
It's a bit hard to describe what happened, but perhaps ... the processing unit always worked fine, but
the data input to it became very unreliable because of huge gaps in memory. Of course, there was also
the downward spiral of her bodily functions ... well, let's just cut this reminiscence short. As I said, it was
not fun for any of us.
From Al Berry, my parents' closest friend during the latter years of their life together.
I've only seen my parent's graves twice; the first time was when I buried my mother's ashes, the second was when I took the pictures below. Finding the cemetery the first time took some doing. My mother had made all the arrangements, including the inscription on the stone (minus date, of course), but the instructions she left were woefully out-of-date. The man I was supposed to call was long deceased, the company defunct. I knew that the cemetery was in West Medway, however, and a little detective work did the trick. I found a real estate agent who was very helpful. "It sounds like you mean the cemetery on Evergreen ... but that's a very old cemetery". "Yes, that sounds right. We're talking about very old people".
My parents' grave ...
Next to the grave of my father's parents and his sister, Helen.
You saw a portrait of Emma Thayer earler.
It's an old cemetery, parts of it pre-Revolutionary War. Quiet, but I guess most cemeteries are.