Weather, Or Not

Mom dug out boxes of old photographs, all in glorious gray scale. There were distant ancestors, great aunts and uncles, in-laws, ancient people posed with descendants then children, now themselves ancient or dead, pictures of children who died at six, or ten, or twenty, people standing on porches of houses long since demolished, or standing next to streamlined new cars that would now be antiques had they survived. There was one picture of my oldest nephew in a stroller, my dog lying next to him, the background a view of the hazy San Gabriel Valley behind our house in the hills on some serene day ages ago.

I myself might have taken that picture, as well as several others from around that time, with our old Kodak Duaflex, as I started doing that when I was about eight or nine years old. Odd, that the pictures I may have taken seem as archaic as those from long before I was born. They are all shards of moments and places made only slightly less ephemeral than their vast, unseen context by having been captured on film. The pictures jog the memory, but only those memories restore the identity of those pictures. A few of the pictures have already become anonymous. Some day, all will be. I don't know which state evokes greater melancholy.