Of the three of us, it was my grandmother who preserved the photographs, as automatically diligent as if she were canning garden vegetables to carry us through the white worst months of winter. The albums even had their own sort of cellar: the dark and dust beneath the bed my father and I shared. Gee gosh, someday—the announcement always meant under-the-bed diving was being done, she was retrieving one or another album in which to put this year’s school picture of me as a startlingly pompadoured sixth-grader or one of my father in unbuckled overshoes beside his latest obstetrical miracle, triplet purebred Hereford calves, or of Grandma herself posed beside the Jeep with her beloved but fidgety sheepdogs, Spot and Tip, ambivalently atop the hood.
All said and done, a photograph is a knowing wink from the eye of time.
