I’ve decided that my nieces and nephews need to hear some of the old family stories of relatives in their far distant past or ones they never met. This photo sent to me by my cousin Sara today gave rise to a story when Forgottenman asked me some question about it.

The members of the group are my mother, her two sisters and the husbands of two of them. Left to right, my Aunt Peggy, Uncle Rob, my mom Pat, My father Ben and my Aunt Betty. Uncle Ed, Aunt Betty’s husband, must have taken the photo, or perhaps he stayed home and a stranger took it. At any rate, I believe it is taken on the Capitol steps in D.C. where my glamorous Aunt Betty (of Filipino Lantern May Basket fame) lived. The three women are sisters–at that time the only remaining members of a family of six sisters and two brothers.  Rob and Peggy had driven from Wyoming, picked up my parents in South Dakota and driven to D.C. and points south, going through the states of Kansas and Missouri, where the ladies were born and raised.

One of the most memorable stories of that trip was told to us by my Uncle Rob, a sparkly-eyed gentleman who happened to be the State Superintendent of Schools for the state of Wyoming but who also had a rollicking sense of humor. I adored him.

The story as he told it was that he, Rob, was driving on the Interstate or whatever the equivalent of an Interstate was in the 60’s.  As I recall, they were now in Pennsylvania and for the past fifteen minutes or so, they had passed mile after mile of big fields of grapes. Dad, a rancher and farmer, was always interested in whatever was growing and so Rob was not too surprised when they came to a turn-off, that dad asked him to pull over and stop the car.

He was surprised, however, when dad opened the car door and bounded down the ditch up to the barbed wire fence that surrounded the field, reached over the fence and grabbed a vine, tugged at it and came streaking back to the car streaming a long vine of grapes behind him, jumped into the back seat and started handing the grapes around. My dad consistently astonished and delighted my uncle who had pulled a few hijinks himself in his past, some of which I’ve related in this blog.

I think this photo is an incredible contrast to recent events on those same steps.