The wedding

It has been fun to look at the old pictures my mother had in a bin inside one of her closets. I found a huge stack of old black and white photos of family, most of them unknown to me, and several of them of my grandparents at a young age. The best find was a small stack of slides in an envelope that turned out to be my parents' wedding photos. I have never seen my parents' wedding photos. There was no book of pictures like our neighbor had that we would look at and laugh at, and when I would ask my mother if she had a book she would always say that there was one somewhere. It wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I realized she was lying about that. She and my dad married almost two years after I was born because he was married to someone else. Oops. When I was told this information it was done as if it were some huge secret that had long been hidden and could cause dire consequences once spoken. I just remember feeling relieved because I was worried they were going to tell me I had another father. I remember looking at them and saying, "Uh, yeah, so?" But then things I had felt and seen began to make sense and I realized that back in the 60's this would have been scandalous and a big deal, and I'm sure it was a huge deal to my two sisters who lived through what had to be a horror for them.

I asked once about the wedding pictures after learning the truth and I was told there were pictures, but I never saw them. Until now. For some reason I never pushed the issue of seeing the pictures with my mother. It felt, well, it felt strange as if I had no right to see them or that it was something my mother didn't want to share. Now I wish I had pushed it because I have questions. Why did they get married in a church? Who were the two people that stood up for them? Why is my mother wearing two different outfits? Which one did she wear to get married? Where are the 5X7 pictures that my dad ordered off of these slides?

Of course they are on slides and I no longer have the slide scanner. I have a slide viewer and I look at the pictures and wonder. Since discovering all of these old photos I have decided that an easier way of converting pictures to my computer is by photographing them on my phone and transferring them. Madison things the quality isn't as good, but I think they are just as good especially since my husband doesn't want me to scan pictures at a high resolution because it takes up too much space on the computer. I'm not sure how much space this new way is taking up, but it is certainly easier than scanning them one at a time. But this won't work for the slide pictures despite my trying really hard. I took a picture of it through the slide viewer and then tried to crop and enlarge, and while that worked the quality did not transfer.

I suppose I can ask my mother-in-law for her slide scanner again or perhaps take them somewhere to have prints made, but right now I just keep them on my desk and peer at my parents, strangers in a way to me in these slides.