Family photos
I've been having fun going through albums of old family photos while visiting my parents in my hometown of Holland, Michigan. The one at the top of this post, probably dating from about 1931, shows my very young mother at left, her younger sister, and their mother, my grandmother, next to a late 1920s car in the countryside. Is it broken down? Are they in Wisconsin (likely) or Iowa? My grandfather was probably the photographer, using a Kodak box camera popular at the time. My grandparents are long gone, but I remember seeing the camera in their house.
One of the albums is full of snapshots like this, mostly black & white but a few in color. Most of the Kodak color photographs have faded to a horrible yellow, but a few--made with a different company's film, perhaps?--have survived. They have faint splashes of real color on black & white, almost as if it was dabbed on later. I carry a portable Canon flatbed scanner, the best $50 I ever spent, when I visit the homes of relatives. If they are willing, and they usually are, I take it out of the suitcase and make digital copies onto my Apple laptop. The software often noticeably improves the black-and-white photos, taking away the effects of time. It can't, I found out, bring back the colors of a faded color photograph. I would need the negative to do that, and they are also long gone.
Albums of old photos are like time machines, taking you back to when your parents were children and your grandparents were vibrant young adults. They are full of "old" cars, farming scenes from another era, and hopeful and smiling school classes and young brides. I see my incredibly thin father in the Navy after World War II and during the Korean War (he was called back). I see him on the streets of Shanghai before the Communist takeover. And I see both of them as students at Hope College, where I also went. He and my mother are 80 now, worrying about whether they will be able to sell their house into Michigan's real estate depression if they need to move into an assisted living center.
Holland is beautiful this Thanksgiving. There hasn't been much snow--none is on the ground now--and many of the trees still have their colorful leaves because of the warm autumn. I asked my mother if there was much talk here about Erik Prince, scion of the prominent local Prince family, and his controversial Blackwater security firm. No, she said. Just the stories in the paper. That's typical Holland. The uncomfortable topics don't get talked about. Life goes on.