When my oldest son got rid of his SmugMug account, I lost some of the photos in the Saturday’s Old Photo posts in my old Blogger blog. Since the primary reason I’m doing these posts is so that my children will have a record of the details of the photos and the family stories associated with them, I don’t want to let the posts go photoless forever. So I’ve decided that on Saturdays when I’m really busy (like today), I’m going to repost an old old photo post and upload the photo that goes with it again. I’ll be rebuilding my old photo post collection and keeping this blog alive on busy Saturdays. They don’t call me the queen of efficiency for nothing!
This post was originally posted in March of 2007.
It’s cold out, so this picture seemed appropriate for today’s old photo. My sister and I are showing off our brand new parkas in this family picture. We’d just moved to Minnesota that fall, and the coats we’d used back in Illinois weren’t appropriate for the colder northern winters, so we’d gone with my mother to J. C. Penney’s to buy us each a parka.
These are what we picked out. If I were writing this unprompted by my mother’s notes on the back of the photo, I’d tell you that the coats were a lovely shade of blue, and then I’d pat myself on the back for my accurate, detailed memory of my childhood. However, my mother’s notes say they were red, and you can trust her on that. That is, I guess, a little warning to us all that while I’m always certain that what I write in these little pieces is factual, I can get my facts wrong.
I remember loving the fuzzy feel of these parkas. I wore mine for a couple of years before I outgrew it, and then my poor sister got my hand-me-down, so she wore the same parka, just different sizes, for four years.
When we moved to Minnesota, we lived in the parsonage at Northern Bible Chapel. The pastor of the church owned his own home, so my dad and mom cleaned the church in exchange for a deal on renting the parsonage. On our first Christmas there, which would have come a month or so after this picture was taken, Mr. Klein, an elderly man from the church who didn’t get out much because he couldn’t leave his sick wife for long, knocked on the door and delivered a package for each of us girls. He’d bought us little white zippered Bibles—the very first Bibles we owned.