Saturday's Old Photo

Here’s an old photo post originally written right before Valentine’s Day 2007. It was missing its photo—many of the old Blogger posts are—so I’ve uploaded it again and I’m reposting everything for this Valentine’s Day.

This picture of my husband and me was taken about four months after we started dating. By this time I knew that we’d get married, but I wouldn’t have admitted it to you. I was only 18, after all, and just starting my first year of Bible school.

He was 23 and ready to settle down. He’d asked God to send him someone and the next day I started work at the truck stop where he was already working. He thought I was cute; then he found out I was a pastor’s daughter and that was all the confirmation he needed. He was wise not to tell me this until much later because I’d have sent him packing.

I married him in the end because he was a worthy Scrabble opponent. When you meet your match at Scrabble, it is foolish to let him go.

We played Scrabble for blood, no mercy. My strength was inventing words and convincing him they were real by making up bogus but plausible definitions. His talent was using all seven of his letters at once on a triple word score. In one game, he did that three times in a row. How could I come back after that?

That last winter we played 22 games and each won 11. That last winter was when I learned that sometimes you must let your perfect Scrabble match go.

Saturday's Old Photo

In this photo taken in 1927, you have my father’s first family. He’s the baby and the tot is his brother Elton. His dad, Bruce Russell, is on the left and his mother Mary is holding him. The other man isn’t identified, so I can’t tell you who he is.

It looks like they’ve been fishing—maybe camping—and the trailer the car is pulling suggest a trip, yet the horizon is the flat of Kansas, so they haven’t gone far. I’ve never thought of Kansas as good fishing territory, but that catch would satisfy anyone.

Don’t you think my grandma looks pert, even a little flapperish? What she didn’t know—couldn’t know—is that before the year was out, she would lose her young husband to a ruptured appendix.

She wouldn’t have to rear her children alone for long. This is, remember, my father’s first family.

Saturday's Old Photo

For the first two years of my life, my dad was a student  at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, and I lived with my parents on campus there. The married students attending in the 1950s lived in little trailers in what was known as Trailerville. You see one of the Trailerville trailer houses in the background of this photo.

Most of the trailers would have been the size of our travel trailers. My family had only three people—my parents and me—but some couples had four or five children. Can you imagine what it would have been like to spend a rainy day with five children in one of those little homes? Now, a mother could just pack  all the kids in the car and drive someplace for a break, but back then, no one used the car—if they had one—for trivial things like that.

And none of the trailers had bathrooms. Instead, there was a communal shower house and a communal laundry. There was no air conditioning, either, and the trailers became like ovens in the heat, so when it was hot, families spent most of the day outdoors.

I’ve made things sound miserable, but I think my mother was really happy in Trailerville. She loved having lots of people around her, so meeting a neighbour or two every time she used the bathroom or did the laundry wasn’t necessarily a drawback for her.

That’s me on the trike in the center of the group of Trailerville kids. Going by the date printed on the photo, I would have been 15 or 16 months old, so there’s no way I could actually ride that trike. Maybe that’s why I’m looking so grumpy.