Photographs and Time

Now that our place is at least semi-settled, I have embarked (perhaps prematurely) on the Herculean task of sorting bags and boxes of photographs that had accumulated over the decades when printed pictures were still in vogue. We have been lugging these fossils behind us on every move, never finding the energy and time to provide them with some rationale. At the moment overlapping piles of photos are lying about the living room, each crying for further attention and systematizing. Yesterday I purchased an album which allows the display of larger photographs and filled it last night with no difficulty. Its contents span not just decades but even centuries! The first is a picture taken in 1897 of assembled students and teachers in front of the Pine Grove School in Calabogie, Ontario. The school, a rough-hewn wooden structure disappeared in a fire many years ago, but the photograph captures the solemn faces of 44 students and four adults, including my twelve-year old grandmother, Alberta Stewart (later Craig), her twin sister Jessica, their younger brothers, twins Edwin and Edgar, and Murray. All five children of that family of 13 children are wearing clothing clearly made of the same materials, undoubtedly tailored by their mother.

Below these children is a picture taken in the summer of 1942 or 43 on Ann St in Belleville, Ont. In the still ubiquitous black and white photo are two little girls, their arms about one another, standing on the grass in front of their semi-detached house. The younger, me, in a period of which I have but the vaguest of memories is squinting at the camera (held most likely by my dad) with a shy smile, while the slightly older girl (by 19 months), my big sister Linda, is smiling down at me with the fondness of an older, more confident child. The pictures continue their recorded moments through the decades as one turns the pages: Linda and I a couple of years later photographed at Argue Photography where my mother’s sister Ethel (always called Chick) was working; (happily, Chick lived with us at that time); Linda and I with Alma, my mother’s formidable older sister; a jump to 1947 or 48 in Ottawa at the church wedding of Chick to Alan Argue, the returned soldier brother of Chick’s Belleville employer. Mom is the pictured bridesmaid and her parents, my Craig grandparents appear proudly in the group shot. A few more black and white pics: my handsome father about age 40, my sister’s wedding to Darcy Brooks with the attending parents; (I am missing from the picture as I was then ensconced in the novitiate of the colloquially called Hotel Dieu nuns near Kingston); Linda and Darcy came to see me on their honeymoon. I know that Linda found it painful that I was not with her at her wedding, a fact that moves me now as I think of those times. The last black and white before we move to splendid, though in some ways not as nuanced, coloured photos, is of me at age 25 in the costume of the happy baccalaureate. Interesting to look into one’s own face in a staged photo of that nature. One looks so well put together and in many ways, of course, one is, and yet so much is uncertain and unexplored.

The pictures rapidly jump then into colours and into a whole other era: pictures of Elizabeth at age four when we lived at one of the Therafields’ properties east of Orangeville; of Elizabeth and Catherine, three and seven at Howland Ave; several pictures of the three of us when I had the Yarmouth Rd house; a great shot of Catherine, 15, with Christine and Julia Pagel taken at DJ and Liz’s place at Fletcher Lake; a few shots of Mark and me on our travels; a picture that I have always loved, that I think of as a Madonna shot of Catherine holding baby Emily, as Theoren, age two, who has climbed up beside his mother, is tenderly kissing her cheek; Catherine and Eli happily smiling at the camera with their two lovely babies; a picture taken in Orillia of two-year old Theoren, who often came to stay with us, with Mark and me, the happy grandparents; a shot of Mark and me, splendidly attired about to cut our wedding cake; and last though never least, the graduation picture of our beautiful niece, Tracy, daughter of my long deceased sister Valerie.

This small set of pictures that I have organized into an album is only the beginning of an attempt to make the pictorial history of our lives more accessible. Practically all of the others are the standard 4x6 size and will fit into easily procured folders. It will take some time to put them into order and to assign each its place. I’m happy to have entered into this process, however, as in doing so I find myself sliding back and forth between eras, remembering and meditating on the events and the relationships that each has contained. It seems a fitting activity for someone like me, at this time of my life, to pull out these strands and to reflect on them, what they have been and what they are now in what I call my life-to-date.