Category Archives: Memories

The Ghost in the Image

Emotions, Memories, Television, ,

In 1970 I watched an episode of Night Gallery called Certain Shadows on the Wall and it scared the bejesus out of me. I don’t really remember the storyline at all (IMBD helped: “Sickly Emma Brigham dies, but her shadow is still visible on one wall of the family mansion”) but I remembered the shadow. It is one reason I am afraid of the dark.

I did remember that Agnes Moorehead was the shadow, and I remembered the shadow too. I’d forgotten the photograph of me at thirteen that always made me think of this ghost story. I recently came across the photograph and had to look up the episode.

Looking at the picture of me, besides seeing the ghost shadow recreated, I remember that chair. It was my grandpa Patrick’s chair and Grandma gave it to my dad when she moved from the farm. I remember the smell of the leather (or vinyl) — it was the smell of my dad’s head.

I don’t remember the curtains my mom had on the windows in the living room though. That must have been temporary. I’ll have to do a blog post about those windows someday.

Grandpa’s Chair

Family, Memories, Things, ,

My grandparents had a child’s rocking chair when they lived in Elgin. Generations of children sat on it and I really wanted to own it someday for my own children. It went to my Aunt Ginny, the only of my mom’s siblings who didn’t have children. I think I did ask her for it when Clare was born, but she wasn’t ready to let it go. After she died it sat in storage until last April when Dean and I picked it up in Mississippi. So while I have no photos of my kids in the chair, I do have some of my granddaughter in it.

I don’t think there are any photos of my grandfather in the chair, but here he is as a child in the arms of his mother, Jessie, and standing next to her mother, Nettie McCornack.

My aunt Ginny was photographed sitting in the chair, however, in this photo taken on the porch of 501 Raymond in Elgin. L-R: Uncle Dick, Aunt Nancy, Grandpa Green, Grandma Green, Mom, Uncle Bud, and Aunt Ginny in the rocking chair.

We celebrated Mother’s Day in Bethesda shortly after returning from Mississippi and had Lassen try out the chair. She wasn’t impressed.

A few months later she liked it better.

I love this chair and its history. Hopefully it will be used by more generations.

A butterfly barrette

Memories, People, Things, ,

Until 5 minutes ago I thought the type of design of this butterfly barrette was cloisonné. I was mistaken. I don’t know that it has a name. But that’s neither here nor there. This. now broken, metal butterfly barrette is one of a pair that I wore in my late teens. It’s important because another student in my college freshman botany class had the same barrettes. She seemed popular and well-known to the teacher. I admired her from afar — I am pretty sure she didn’t know I existed. I thought she was beautiful.

After that class I don’t know that I ever saw her at school, but I remembered her and I remembered her name. I was devastated when, one morning the following winter, it was announced on the local radio station that she’d died in a car accident.

That could have been the end of it. I might have kept the broken barrette and maybe wondered why I did so when I came across it nearly fifty years later, not remembering the young woman from my botany class who wore an identical pair of butterfly barrettes in her youth. I’ll never forget her because a little over two years after hearing about her death I met a man at a bar who, when he told me his name, I asked if he was related to that girl who died. He said she was his sister.

He and I married a few years after that.

An epilogue to the story is that our daughter sometimes looks like her Aunt Debbie. I once mused that perhaps what attracted me to Debbie was based on a premonition of what my daughter would look like as a young woman.

Clare
Debbie