Who Keeps What?

Today is Day's 42nd birthday.
I just sent her a bunch of school pictures of herself--some of which she'll see this morning and wonder: What were we thinking with the hair?

Is it just my perception, or do we all agree: that fifth grade (and thereabouts) is (of all the ages of childhood) our least attractive age?

She won't mind my sharing these, however:

Here she was sitting in the yard beside our house in Helotes

With Tony, our dog, the German Shepherd who followed her everywhere

and protected her....

And here's our little cowgirl with her Granddaddy!

I thought of this picture this morning when Day told me that Tom and the boys

had given her cowboy boots for her birthday!

Here's something uncanny:

Her Granddaddy Lloyd--about fifty in this picture--

looks SO MUCH LIKE Tom, 

the man she would grow up and marry!

And here we are, Daisy and me.  She was in high school and I was--well, I was about the age she is today, actually!

                                                         HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Daisy!


Sending these pictures reminds me of a conversation I had with Janet Penley yesterday morning as I was driving along Highway 5, before phone reception disappeared:

Janet was talking about  Carlene's "glimpses"....
which made us both think about the way mothers remember things about their children's childhoods that the children don't remember.

Janet wondered: When is it time to send her children all their pictures and all the memorabilia from their childhood years?

I remembered that I'd already given my children most of their pictures, though I still have the negatives...

"Maybe never," Janet said.
Maybe that's what we do as mothers: we are the keepers of someone else's childhood.