Mirror Image

When my mom's mother died, my uncle bought the house from his siblings. Because of this, he ended up with a lot of my grandmother's posessions for a long time. This year, for Christmas, he gave my mom and my aunt each a photo album filled with original pictures of them as children, and pictures of their mom. Most of these pictures had been lost in a box in his storage since not long after she died. It was one of the best Christmas presents ever, even for me. I had so much fun looking at them, and seeing my grandmother young and beautiful, and my mom as a little girl.

What I found out, which I had never known, never having had baby pictures of my mom around before, was that we looked exactly alike. Here, I'll show you.

The little girl in the foreground in my aunt, Kellea, blowing out her candles on her fourth birthday. The background? My sweet momma. Sorry about the quality of the picture. It was a scan of a scan of a scan, and very pixelated, so I blurred it up a bit. Though now it looks a lot like something I would paint, so who knows, maybe I'll do that.

And here you have me, at that same table in my great-grandmother's house, this time at Easter. As you've seen before, pictures of me at this age are always full of attitude. It was so strange looking at those pictures, because it felt like I was looking at myself, yet knew I wasn't. And the thing that cracked us up the most was that even after 20 years, my great-grandmother had the same table cloth in both pictures. Apparently this woman never threw anything away.