April 1956

I've been working on scanning some pictures and wanted to take a minute to share one. It is my older brother Jay and I sitting on the couch in the living room. We are both wearing hats. Perhaps coonskin caps, Hard to tell from the picture. Jay is holding a dog and from the look on the dog's face he appears he would rather be anywhere else. In the picture I am just over 2 years old and my older brother is just short of 4 years old.

We appear to be a couple of happy little guys. It got me wondering. Why was this picture taken? No ones birthday. Surely it wasn't to get a picture of the dog. What the hell was going on? The picture below I think might reveal the reason.

I draw your attention to the crayon work on the wall above our heads. Apparently these two young fellas got a bit heavy handed with the crayons. Unsupervised boys and crayons are never a good idea. I'm sure mom was struggling a bit at the time. It would have been spring and planting was either under way or the field work to get ready for planting was going on. In addition a third boy would be added to the mix in August that year. So mom probably had to do something important like fix us lunch and we took full advantage of the opportunity to redecorate the place with our crayons. Mom still lives in that house and somewhere under those layers of paint lies that artwork from almost 60 years ago. I don't remember this incident but I'm sure it wasn't the only time we did something with crayons while mom was busy doing something else.