BY MICHELE MILLER
What’s What New Port Richey
March 9, 2023
This is my mom, circa 1952, posing in a floral dress in the gravel driveway of my childhood home in Weymouth, Massachusetts. She’s holding my two older sisters – one in her arms and the other in her belly we figured out – after noting birthdays and doing the math.
The last time I saw this shot was Christmas back in the 1970s when my brothers and sisters pooled our money to buy one of those clunky carousel slide projectors so our parents could finally get around to seeing the photo slides dad had taken in the years before he got the Polaroid.
“Wow, look at you, Millie,” I remember my oldest sister’s boyfriend saying, letting go a whistle, as we gathered our new perspective, mouths agape at the larger-than-life image of our mother projected on the white kitchen wall.
She was young and beautiful and thankfully that gravel driveway had been paved over because it was a real bitch to shovel in the wintertime even with five of us splitting the chore. Steadfast at my mom’s right heel with her tongue hanging out is the family cocker spaniel, “Tippy,” who before my time, took an ill-fated trip to “a country farm,” the story goes, after nipping a neighborhood kid.
Didn’t remember seeing the dog back in the 70s. Tippy came to light in fact, while I was in the process of digitalizing and in some cases lightening these old family slides that came into my possession over the last year or so. It’s a time-consuming work in process, one that bestows a look back and a new perspective all at once.
I’ll take it…..onward. <3
Photo Caption – Sisters and the new family dog, Trixie, in later years playing in the snow banks lining that gravel driveway.
NOTE: Are you looking to digitalize your old photos but don’t know where to start? Check out the ongoing Photo Scanning programs offered at the Pasco County Libraries’ Centennial Park branch on Moog Road in Holiday.
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