I love this picture because it is so candid and relaxed, unlike so many pictures of that era. I'm curious about where it was taken. The family was living in Los Angeles by then, and they loved the beach. Maybe she's sitting in a little cabana at the beach?
In 1957, right before we moved from Los Angeles to Moylan, Pennsylvania, my parents flew back east to look for a place for us to live. While my parents were away, my brother Johnny and I stayed with Aunt Georgia and Grandma Crozier, who were living together in Aunt Georgia's lovely little Long Beach bungalow. Johnny was almost ten, and I was seven, and the two of us were very companionable at that age; we had a great time during our two weeks there.
Aunt Georgia had a little closed-in back porch that was filled with empty soda bottles. She and Grandma told us that if we washed the bottles(!) and returned them to the store, we could keep the deposit money, which was two cents a bottle. What a windfall that was for us! We dutifully washed the bottles, loaded them up into a little wagon, and took them to the store. We spent the money on comic books and Fizzies, two forbidden fruits in our household, since my parents were anti junk food and what they considered "junk reading." I can still remember the way the Fizzies dissolved in a glass of water; it was like carbonated Kool-Aid. My favorite flavor was root beer.
The last time I saw Aunt Georgia was in 1960. My parents, Johnny, and I drove across country that summer and visited family in Southern California. Grandma Crozier had dementia by then and was living in an apartment with a full-time caretaker, but we took her out to visit Aunt Georgia. Grandma remembered her, but in Grandma's mind, it was as if they were still children together. I remember gathering around Aunt Georgia's piano, singing hymns heartily and joyfully. As hard as dementia can be, I have such a happy picture of my grandma singing away with her little sister as they must have years before.
I like this photo a lot, too. So fun that you knew Aunt Georgia. Knowing she came into the world under challenging circumstances, having lost her father before she was born, it speaks volumes about the character and faith of her mother that she (and her sisters) were such joyful presences in this world! This is a lovely story, Mary, thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Cousin Terri. It's so nice that you too recognize how extraordinary it was that Georgia and her sisters were able to find such joy in their lives, giving the very difficult struggles they faced in their early years.
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