What Was I Thinking?

I've seen alot of pictures of myself over the last fifty-two years, but this one kind of freaks me out. The original is really small--a little 2 X 3 BW glossy taken with a Kodak Brownie--so teeny and faded that you need a magnifying glass to definitively identify which sister it is (individual pics of middle kids are rare). I never looked at it that closely until my hunt for a baby shower picture uncovered some old family photos I either snitched or copied. The freak-out began when I scanned some of the pictures to my laptop. Surely you're more adept than I am at editing and formatting pictures, but I haphazardly zapped and zoomed until suddenly, I was being stared down by an 8 1/2 X 11 of my own mini-bugged-out eyeballs (adjacent to some elfin ears and a suspicious Vulcan-like hand signal)! Then I had this really odd feeling . . . what was I thinking? My earliest childhood memories are just "flashes" of my Grandaddy Everett eating pickles in a big chair with a lacey doilie on the headrest . . . guess I'll never know what was happening in that little grapefruit for the three years before that. Hmm . . .

Long Live the Gumdrop Tree!

As far back as I can remember, my family decorated a gumdrop tree every Christmas. My mom can't remember exactly how our tradition started, except that candy trees became novel back in the 50's when plastics like Tupperware became widely available. Somehow I inherited the gumdrop tree and have used it every year since . . . until this year when the limbs started suffering from old age and breaking off as each gumdrop was removed. I got a little lump in my throat when I considered that it might be our last Christmas with our sweet little tree . . . but no . . . thanks to the glorious world of cyber commerce, I've located a replacement from Miles Kimball, so the gumdrop tree can live on for another generation!