On The Road Again, Back Then...

On the road again... where we were going when this was taken, I am now, not really sure.    I was the one taking the photo with my Kodak Instamatic. It was the newest camera with a film cartridge and a flash cube. Twelve, twenty-four or thirty six shots were all you got, so there was no wasting film.   My dad is in the drivers seat, my mom is waving, my sister is in the backseat, and I am just glad to be on the road ready for the next adventure.

 We called it Baba's House, even though my sister and I were too young to remember our Baba, (Polish for grandma,)  before she died.  It was the family farm where my mother grew up and my uncle and cousins lived. I am on the right, and my sister is on the left.  I wore my hair in ponytails for so long that the part down the back of my head was almost as permanent as the one on the top of my head.   I watched my uncle use this piece of farm equipment once during "hay-making." It attached to the back of the tractor and acted like a huge rake, scrapping the cut hay into big piles that were later turned into bails.  

Along the back edge of the photo are the huckleberry bushes which we picked and picked until the pails were full.  I remember just eating them with sugar and milk and thinking there was no better taste in the world.  

Swimming at Eagle Lake, was the best part of summer. It was really more of a pond, but one of my cousins painted a wooden sign and stuck it it the ground, so it became Eagle Lake.  Bull-frogs flopped into the still water, dragonflies skimmed along the edges of the pond,  and the distant hum of heat-bugs meant that this was the perfect summer afternoon. My mom and dad, cousin, sister and aunt cooled off in the shade of the old  cabin next to Eagle Lake, and I once again, snapped one of my precious photos.  Later, dinner would be hot dogs held in the campfire on long sticks,  my aunt's potato salad, my mom's jello and RC Cola or orange soda. The adults had Ballentine beer.  The first 'good sunburn' of the summer meant that that night, my skin would sting, but it was all worth it.