That's the way it was...

My brother was so kind as to scan so many slides that my father had created over the years. I picked a few fun ones to highlight here.

The one below is from the early 1960's when we used to travel 'up' north to Grandma and Grandpa's house to celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving.
Can you see why I like winter???

We spent summers in this tiny cottage which had two rooms and a bathroom. We had cold running water but no tub or shower. If I recall, the tiny house was built for my Grandmother's parents to live out their elder years. 

[I don't know the person on the bench with the dog...but that is the only shot I found of the little house]

My dad stayed in the 'city' working while we lived in the cottage all summer. He'd come up for his vacation and stay with us. I wonder how hard it was to not see his family for months on end. Mom would go to Grandpa's house for a weekly phone call from Dad [I think]. 

We spent a lot of time with our cousins whose father had horses. This is where we learned to ride and where we learned not to fear falling off. 

These two horses were my Uncle's best animals. The mother is on the right. She was named Babe. On the left was Dusty, her daughter. I'm in the front and my sister is behind me.

We were probably in the wooden round pen where Lyle trained horses.

We also spent quite a bit of time at my other Uncle's house. He was a dairy farmer among other things. The experiences of living two separate lives really shaped how I feel about city and rural living.

Our summer time did not include TV, phones, or obviously the internet. We played, we rode our bikes to the lake, went swimming, played cards, fought, and worked in the garden. We were kids. We rarely wore shoes in the summer. Shoes were saved for 'good' and for school when we were required to wear them.

Our lives were divided between the North Shore of Chicago and NW Wisconsin.

I may have mentioned somewhere before that I had an eye/vision issue. I still do, but here I am at 16 years old with my birthday gifts from mom. Just what I wanted! Once a Tomboy, always a Tomboy.

Since my eyes don't work together, I don't have normal depth perception like other people. I often had to wear an eye patch to try and make the weaker eye much stronger. I wore glasses since I was very young and by this age, I could see pretty well thanks to the efforts of my parents who paid for eye surgery when I was a little kid.

I learned a different way of telling distances from how things moved. Don't ask me how, but I was pretty good at softball!

In the mid 1960's my dad rented a house from a friend at work and our lives changed again. We stayed in a house on the Big Island of Hawaii in a place called Puako. We scrimped and saved each year for this opportunity. We got to spend up to a month on the island for several summers.

Below is a shot of myself and my sister sitting out on the lava flow watching the ocean and probably imagining things.

My mom loved fishing so she took up a part time job so we could charter a boat during our vacations. I don't know how many times we went out on the Spooky Luki, but eventually Zander Budge, the captain, did allow me to drive along the Kona Coast. I'm sure each of us took a turn in the calm waters we were in, but I recall this vividly. I loved being out on the ocean.

There was nothing quite like it.

What can I say? My parents were pretty awesome.

In 2001, I had the wonderful opportunity to go back to the Big Island with Dad for two weeks.

That trip was amazing. 

Photo of Dad in Kona in front of the King Kam Hotel.

And now? I'm still that adventurous kid at heart. 

Well...for as long as I can be....

It is all his fault!

My Father that is. He was creative and had a playful mind.

One of the biggest regrets is that I don't have many photos of him. And I realize why. When he first picked up a camera, there was NO such thing as selfies. 

I don't know when this photo was taken or who took it. But there he is with a Brownie reading a light meter. I remember him with a Pentax film camera. He had one lens and it was a long lens. He used to let me hold it and pretend to take photos. Other times he'd have me make a box with my fingers and hands to make a 'frame'.
It was a game we played. I could frame a photo with my hands and we would go over what his light meter said.

I can't imagine the challenges that he had when taking photos of us kids doing activities. The winter photo could be around 1965 when we had a huge snowstorm. We took turns leaping off the piled up snow into the yard. 
The one leaping is me.

I seemed to leap a lot...

I am a bit less carefree about leaping now. 

I often wonder how things would be different had my father been able to learn and own a digital camera. Considering that he had to manually focus and meter most of his photos, he did quite well. 

We all loved and hated it when he'd walk around with that long lens of his. I think I was in trouble for something here and had a time out to think. Dad must have gone into another room and captured this through the doorway. 

The shot below is from one of the times we rented a house in Puako on the Big Island.
I fell deeply in love with this dog and it followed me everywhere for the month we stayed. I recall crying like a baby when we had to leave. 

I think we called him Hero.

Hero even showed up in a portrait my father did of all the women that had gone on the trip. This included mom, sis, me & Hero, my mom's friend, and my cousin.

See? It is my dad's fault that I love photography so much. 

Probably my dad's fault that I'd like to go back to the Big Island again. So many happy and wonderful memories were created over the years there.

So this past Father's Day had me thinking about Dad and all the cool stuff he enabled us to do with his crazy ideas.

The first time we went to Hawaii, Dad had asked to rent a friend's house he'd seen a photo of.

The friend said sure.

Dad wanted to rent the house for a family vacation. Dad thought it was in Florida.

It wasn't. 

But somehow my parents actually made it happen. And we went each summer from 1965-1974.

It was all Dad's Fault.

Young Me...

I heard about the 'aging' photo challenge on FB by accident the other day. Guess I'm not one of those that likes selfies.
Nor do I like to remind myself of how weathered my face has become. I say weathered because I think it is kinder than saying old and wrinkled.

Perhaps the weather does have a lot to do with my skin. I don't really protect it from the rough dry winter air while hiking. I do use sunscreen on my face but most of the time I forget.

I don't spend much time indoors. Even with the snow fall today, I was out picking up branches and sticks from the blow down we had two years ago. I tossed hundreds of chunks of wood, bark, and sticks onto a small brush fire that I have had going since 10 am this morning.
[It is now nearly 3:30 pm and I am done in!] I can't believe how many branches and dead old wood I picked up from the north side of the little shed.

I explained to Rich that I may as well go in there and clean it up while there were no weeds growing and while there were no bugs. Besides, it is much better to do something like that than sitting in the house watching the snow fall to the ground.

I tidied up in the large shed and gave Mica and extra helping of hay. I put the hay to put out for this evening in the large black carcass sled.

It looks like I may have to drive the skid steer again this weekend. We were only supposed to get a few inches. Well that changed to the change of a bunch. There is a prediction of up to 9 inches or maybe only 5.
The temperatures are going to plummet again which will make the ice formations do more interesting things along the creek bottom.

Oh wait...
I started out talking about the Aging Challenge photos. Huh.
Well here are a few young photos of me over the years.

My brother had many of my father's slides scanned and digitalized.

Here are a few of my younger self.

I believe this is the winter of 1965. I'm standing watching Kilauea in the distance. I'm actually at the Halemaumau vent. I'm sure that has changed.

Here we are as a family. Dad is taking the photo. We are on the Devastation Trail which was a boardwalk then. We drove the whole park on the Chain of Craters Road which was closed in 1969 because of a lava flow. However, it keeps getting rebuilt on top of the new lava flows....

There I am in the middle belly surfing on stryofoam boards at Hapuna Beach, this was before their was the Queen's Highway to Kona. And this was before the Mauna Kea Hotel was built just north of Hapuna.
There were no shelters or bathrooms then either.

Years later?

Hapuna Beach:

My mother is on the right and I am on the left. I think this is one of my favorite photos of all time. My mom and I look like sisters. Dad caught us in a moment where we aren't paying attention to each other but mom and I ... are both lost in our own thoughts...

There it is ... the young me.

Reading Far Side of Fifty's Blog has brought back fond memories just as my brother began posting photos.