Isn't modern technology both intimidating and liberating?  Just when I have figured out how to work a remote control, take a picture on my digital camera, actually get a Netflix movie to stream on my television via my son's playstation, download a new song on my MP3 player or use social media, something new comes along and you have to start all over!  In this ever-faster, do-it-now, instant gratification world of ours, it's sometimes nice to take a big breath and think back on days that had a more natural pace and rhythm.  My pictures today are of my aunts, uncles and my mother when they were growing up in southwestern Indiana.  There is just something so sweet and innocent about the pictures that makes me want to step into their world for a little bit and play with them.  I'm sure they had as much fun as Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley's barefoot boy!

Oh, and how did I manage this step back in time?  My mother found these pictures and passed them on to a cousin of mine, who scanned them and put them on his facebook page.  I copied them from his facebook page on my computer and pasted them in my blog post.  I guess technology has its good points!  I hope you find time today to find your own 'pause' button and enjoy some of the simpler things in life.  Tea, anyone?

Aunt Mary, Uncle Lowell and Uncle Phil, 1938

A Barefoot Boy

A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play --
For May is here once more, and so is he, --
His dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee,
And his bare ankles grimy, too, as they:
Cross-hatchings of the nettle, in array
Of feverish stripes, hint vividly to me
Of woody pathways winding endlessly
Along the creek, where even yesterday
He plunged his shrinking body -- gasped and shook --
Yet called the water 'warm,' with never lack
Of joy. And so, half enviously I look
Upon this graceless barefoot and his track, --
His toe stubbed -- ay, his big toe-nail knocked back
Like unto the clasp of an old pocketbook.

James Whitcomb Riley

My mother is the youngest girl, standing in between her sister Hester and her brother Lowell, 1928

 

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going. 
--Tennessee Williams