then and now.

My family didn’t ever take too well to official and sedate portraits. You know, like the ones you see from Olan Mills or JCPenney. And honestly, I don’t remember posing for one formal Christmas picture my whole childhood.

Instead, we’d pick a theme every year at the beach–Cowboys and Indians, Mobsters and Flappers, Pirates, etc.–and get our family portraits taken at an Old Tyme Photo Shoppe.

Yes, we had class, you guys.

Nothing quite says class like a dress that opens up in the back with three or four tied enclosures in the sophisticated style of a hospital gown.

Anyway, here I am in one of those portraits.

I look a little sad, but I wasn’t. Not at all. Not unless I got in trouble, which happened, like, twice a year (much to my brothers’ and sister’s chagrin, I’m sure).

I dreamt a lot.

And had a very sensitive heart.

And was thoroughly terrified by tsunamis (and, at the same time, quite intrigued by the way it’s spelled with a silent ‘t’). If someone had only explained to me that I lived a good two hour drive away from the shore, therefore no tsunami could ever get me in the woods of Pennsylvania, things might have been a little less stressful as a kid, you know.

But, anyway.

In some respects, not much has changed.

Not even the face I make.

Luckily, however, that dress I am wearing wasn’t gaping open all the way down the back, as the dress in the former picture was. It sure would have made for an interesting subway commute, though. But compared to that kind of interesting, I’ll take boring, for a change.

But it’s quite a thought–little me then and grown-up me now. The nice part is that I think the two would get along, should they ever meet. I don’t think the two are all that different, save some of the ways a few of life’s lessons have showed up in the sound of my laughter and the cadence and direction of my thoughts.

Sometimes I can feel a little afraid of me then; like, she’d be so disappointed because this isn’t what she planned–not at all. But then I realize that she was a strong little kid and she’d get it. She loved so hard then–fit her whole family and some precious friends and more than a few good animals right inside her small-ish heart–and I think she’d agree that, no matter what, to keep loving. Just as hard. And to keep crying, too. Just as hard.

She wrote songs for her animals then, and I think she’d like to listen to the songs I’m writing now. They’re a little darker, true, but she’d know that there isn’t ever just one song that is the final word. I think she’d listen and smile and tell me not to forget myself and that even though life feels so damnably grey sometimes, black and white still do exist.

Good and evil.

And so find the good and cling to it.

Hard.

“Just as hard as always,” she’d say.

And I’d agree; I sure would.