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The name Linda in its Germanic roots means, soft, tender, but my mother preferred the Spanish version, beautiful. We were often reminded of her beauty when men stopped to chat with her while on a mundane trip to the grocery store, or friends of ours – your mother, she’s so young-looking. I was proud and confused by my mother’s beauty because for all the attention she received, she was never satisfied with the way she looked. She was always searching, for something, but I never knew what. I go back to before I was born, I root through images. I see a young woman who took ceramic classes, writing workshops, drawing lessons. I see trips to the beach and beautiful dresses that I wish she had saved for me. I knew an older woman who lived deep in the past, wondering what she’d be when she grew up.
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1976
It’s Mother’s Day and I want to write about how my mother was a charismatic, extremely complicated woman, but I don’t know where to start. She was beautiful and vain, full of bright laughter and dark secrets. She swam like a fish and swore like a sailor. She cooked an amazing eggplant Parmesan, but boiled asparagus to its death. In spurts of generosity, she’d give chotchkies to friends, but grew angry when you touched her belongings because they were hers and nobody else’s. She lived mostly in her bedroom the last years of her life, surrounded by Beatles biographies, her ashtray full of spent cigarettes, The Sound of Music on DVD. She typed over 100 words a minute, but never figured out how to use a computer. She kept endless lists of people and places I remember and don’t remember her talking about when she was alive. I keep lists too, and finding the ones from my mother makes me think, Why didn’t I know this about her before? On wide-ruled paper, in black ink, she tells me a memory: I remember the time me and Ruthie went to the DQ to meet Freddie, barefoot in the rain.
1975
1974
boardwalk
My mother loved to travel. I had forgotten this about her these past five years because she spent most of those years at home. In the early 1970s, she and her friends ventured weekends to Virginia Beach on standby flights. Gone are the days where you can just show up at the airport and wait at the ticket counter for an available seat, but that’s what my mother did in her early 20s. She and my father married young and divorced young; there weren’t many vacations where my sister and I traveled with them as a family. Rummaging through her things, I find childhood icons of her past trips — a TWA make-up bag that I used as a tiny purse; a beach towel with “I heart Virginia;” her vinyl blue Jetliner suitcase with the mint-green lining which I now use to store photographs. Today is beautiful, unusually warm, a day I know my mother would have taken us for a drive. I wondered where I got this itch to go somewhere else than where I am, but now I know.
blue car
virginia beach
storm
standby
in flight
Like this:
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: 1970s, fragments, mother, photo booth
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There aren’t going to be any fuzzy moments around the fire as my sister and I pour through my mother’s photo albums exchanging memories. It’s going to look more like the two of us sitting at my sister’s kitchen table, elbow-deep in mounds of photos tossed into boxes. Giant U-Haul boxes. After the 70s, it looks as if my mother gave up assembling the images of our lives into any kind of order. Her attachment to these photos has caused a few family arguments over the years, which in retrospect makes me laugh. My stepmother once brought an old photo album of my dad’s to my nephew’s birthday, and when my mother saw it, she grabbed it from my hands and ran out of the house with it to lock in her car. My uncle found his high school yearbook missing two pages; my mother had torn them out for her albums. In cleaning her cedar chest, Jeff found stacks of them ‘like bricks of gold’ hidden underneath a pile of quilts. During the week that she died, my sister spent hours looking for that giant U-Haul box of photos, only to discover it a few weeks later in the office closet, bound in duct tape, “memories” scrawled across the top. In that box, I found a tiny blue leather photo album filled with photo booth pictures. There are no dates, but I’m guessing by her hair styles that they are from 1970-71. It was a challenge to re-assemble them in chronological order, and so I gave up. Looking through the photos, I wonder why, if they were so important to her, she treated them so poorly, why she wouldn’t share them with us, why she hid them away from the world. She may not have realized that she left me the gift of piecing together the fragments of her life through my own stories.
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Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: linda theresa plaikner mcdonough
1969
My mother passed away unexpectedly on January 31st. Last week was the worst week of my life and if it weren’t for my family, my friends and my amazing husband, I don’t know how I would have gotten through it. It’s as if time slipped into another dimension, and by Monday the 7th, I was pushed back into daily life, ill-equipped to do the simplest tasks.
And there is still a part of me that doesn’t believe any of this is real. I’m an organized person who has to plan everything in advance. I analyze situations and intellectualize my emotions because it makes me feel as if I’m in control. I have to ‘know’ everything, there are no surprises for me. But I’m learning that grief has its own way of doing things.
On Saturday, I was in Dollar Tree buying stupid household shit and I felt a tightness in my chest. A box of Sno-Caps made me cry because my mother used to eat them by the bagful. Am I allowed to watch a movie, read a book? Earlier in the week, at my sister’s house, I expected my mother to walk in the room and join the family for dinner. It felt very, very real that this would happen. Then I remembered why we were there. Her death punctuates all the ordinary things that I do each day. It is difficult for me to talk about her in past tense, and it pierces my heart to type any of this. I will never hear her voice again and knowing this terrifies me. I have never felt this much pain.
This past summer, Jeff bought me an alpine souvenir box at an estate sale. It’s also a music box, but we could never get it to work. And on the first day of my mother’s wake, I opened it to get my rings as I usually do, and the tiny strains of a discordant tune began to play. Jeff and I just looked at each other and laughed. The music wouldn’t stop, even after I shut the lid. It played again that evening when I put my rings away for the night, and it hasn’t played since. I know it was her way of telling me that I would get through those next three days. She was there. Is there. It’s a hard road to normal when nothing will ever be the same.
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: christmas 1978, mall santa claus
1978
As a kid I was at turns excited for Santa to come climbing down my chimney and terrified I would actually see the poor bastard standing in my living room. Now that I think about it, our fireplace was closed-off, so that posed the logistics of his arrival, leaving only the front door for him to walk though. With the increase of child abductions in the early ’80s, seeing Santa walk through that door wasn’t going to happen. This photo makes me laugh because it sums up well how I feel about the holidays, and it’s one of my favorite pictures of my baby sister, who today isn’t afraid of anything.
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: all souls' day, post mortem photography, vintage mourning cards
During the 1800s, it was common practice for families to have pictures taken of their dearly departed. This may seem gruesome to us today, but back in a time when the mortality rate was high, especially among children, a photo was one way the family could keep the memory of a loved one. I am fascinated with the history of post-mortem photography ever since I first read about the practice, and have acquired a few photographs for our vintage photography collection. The more I learn about each photo I study, the less freaked out I am about this part of photographic history and my mortality.
The Art of Mourning has detailed information on vintage funeral ephemera, such as mourning cards, as well as hair jewelry — another way the Victorians kept mementos of the dead.
The Burns Archive is a great place to search for historic medical, post-mortem and crime photography. Read this Morbid Anatomy post about the latest memento mori exhibit in NYC.
The Thanatos collection has hundreds of post-mortem photos in their archives, some available to view online.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep is an organization dedicated to the healing powers of post-mortem photography.
Russian funeral, early 1900s
at rest, early 1900s
mourning cards
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: halloween costumes, optical illusions, skulls, vintage halloween postcards
Fall in the small river town where I grew up is spooky and beautiful. The smell of decaying leaves and wood smoke, frosty morning air, warm house lights in windows flickering like candles in the dark — the closest things I have to call home.
guess which one is jeff.
Sites to get you in the holiday mood:
Halloween Photography and Ephemera
Halloween Museum in West Virginia
Virtual Skull Optical Illusion Musuem
1905
who the devil is this from?
"to grandma, 1915." an anniversary gift for Jeff.
october 25, 1915, cleveland oh. an anniversary gift from jeff.
germany, 1924
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: vintage circus, vintage costumes, vintage halloween photography
Halloween is our favorite holiday — so much that we decided to make it our wedding anniversary. The whole month of October is like Christmas for us: Saturday night horror films, planning costumes, finding the perfect pumpkin to carve into a skull face. What more could a girl ask for? Our vintage Halloween collection of old masks, party noisemakers and die-cut decorations is growing; when we buy a house, we’re going to have to make a Halloween room just to stash all the goods.
1950s
1920s
not Halloween, but they are in costume. traveling circus children, 1920s
harlequin. germany, 1926.
lucile wyle. 1920s.
in costume for a school play? I love how the faces look as if they are disappearing.
Filed under: Vintage Photo Album | Tags: cuba lake, egg tossing, labor day weekend, vintage beauty pageant, vintage girl scouts, vintage horseback riding, vintage ice skating
Upcoming travel tales of storm chasing and witch hunting, but here are a few vintage photos from our archives that we just couldn’t find a category for in the collection. Have a safe and happy weekend!
egg tossing
drinking
Cuba Lake, 1948
the dye brothers
jeff's grampa dye, uncle mason and someone we can't see
primping and prancing
skating
biking
scouting
