I’ve been (slowly) scanning old photographs from my mother and uploading them to flickr. Mom knows I’m doing this and when I first started doing it about two years ago, gave me the photographs. This time, however, I just took a large bagful. Some are of people and events that don’t mean anything to me, and they are not old enough for me to care about. But some tell a story.

Today I found a photograph of my mother when she was about the same age as my daughter.

The back of the photograph tells the whole story. She must have sent it to my father when he was in the Navy.

When my mom was 15 or 16 her mother or father suggested she write to a sailor whose brother-in-law they knew from the Moose. She did and I guess, fell in love pretty quickly. Well, who wouldn’t? Dad was a handsome and charming man. They wrote back and forth (mom still has her letters from Dad but he threw hers away) while he was overseas and met up when he was back on leave.

They married when she was 18 and he was 26 – eight years difference between the two.

My daughter is 15 years old. If I knew she would meet a 25 year old next year and marry him in three years, I think I’d send her to a convent.

Old photographs are fun to look at. They usually bring happy memories. Too often, though, they are a huge time-sink.