Azaleas and Rhododendron

Spring seemed to realize somewhere in mid May that perhaps it was going too fast. So it slowed down a bit. I appreciate that, as it means we got to enjoy all the beautiful azaleas and rhododendron in the parks and gardens and cemeteries a bit longer...

 Rhododendron just outside where I live, 13th May.

21st May 

31st May 

And some more flower photos from here, there and everywhere:

 More rhododendron.

Horse chestnut trees. Most of them around here have white flowers but some are pink like this.

 Azaleas of all colours. (These grow in the old cemetery.)

Three Cooks (~1904) - Sepia Saturday 472

An unwritten, undated card from my great-uncle Gustaf's postcard album: "The Three Cooks at Highgate, Mont." The card sits in between postcards from 1904 in the album. Gustaf lived in Pennsylvania between 1902-1911. So far, I have not come across any evidence that he himself ever travelled much further west in the US. But perhaps some friend sent him this card with a letter? 

Somehow, the door in the background does not really suggest a first-class restaurant... And yet there is a printed postcard?

From the official website for the state of Montana, I learn that the discovery of gold brought many prospectors into that area in the 1860s; leading to boomtowns growing rapidly - and declining just as quickly when the gold ran out. Later, there was also silver and copper mining. And a lot of cattle and sheep ranches and wheat farming, as the gold-diggers and miners needed to eat... But the gold ran out (and perhaps silver and copper too); and post-WWI droughts and depression meant that a lot of farmers were forced to leave the state as well.

(That reminds me of a novel I recently read & reviewed on this blog: The Practice House. That was about Kansas, not Montana - but drought and depression hit hard there too.)

Anyway. My best guess at the moment is that the "Three Cooks" postcard may be from a boomtown restaurant for miners; and  perhaps sent with a letter to Gustaf from a friend working in that area for a while. Whether he was one of those three cooks, or a miner eating their food, I'm not likely to ever know!

(If anyone has other ideas, feel free to suggest them.)

I'm linking to Sepia Saturday 472. Connections to the prompt picture (below): Restaurant, male bonding, men standing outside a door... And someone must have had a camera, or there would be no photo! Whether the three cooks ever became Famous I don't know, but they may have been dreaming of it.




PS. I have recently revived my Greetings from the Past blog (based on Gustaf's postcard collection + old family photos) and put in some new posts there this week. This post/card may re-appear there as well a bit further on.

Friday Fun: Spring Market

 

Yesterday was all rainy and windy (and a staying-indoors-day for me); but today offered a clear blue sky, sunshine and around +15°C = rather perfect weather for a walk into town to join the chaos of the annual spring market.

A bit extra chaotic because of all the construction work going on. This building is having more floors added on top - as are a few others around town. I'm not all happy about the houses growing taller in the city - but at least they seem to want to give that tree a chance as well!

Linking to

Greetings from the Past

Looking through some various old postcards again recently (kept in a box with other letters and notes that belonged to my grandmother) made me decide that I ought to get at least the family-related postcards sorted into an album; following the example of the old green one inherited from my grandmother's brother. 

I recalled having seen a big photo album of similar size in the bookshop in town a while back (when I was looking for smaller ones for other projects). So I went back now to check if they still had that big size. They did, so I bought it (the red one).

In some ways the big album is not very convenient, as it gets very heavy when full, and is too big for most of my shelves! But for this particular project it felt right, as it matches the shape and size of the old one - and the cards I primarily wanted to get sorted were from the same time period (going back even to WWI). (The new album has plastic pockets though. Not sure how good that is from archive point of view. But at least it's convenient for now!)

After I had put in the old cards from grandma's box, there was still room in the new album for some more. So I dug into another box, and also added some from my own lifetime - like cards sent to me from my parents, or from me to them. 

All of this also stirred my interest in the really old cards again... So I'll give it a go to revive my old plan of posting about them on my family history blog, Greetings from the Past. A project started in 2012, but abandoned after a couple of years, because I just had too much else going on... (And I think I was without a working scanner for a while as well.) Between 2013 and recently, I only added a few posts based on photos rather than on the postcards. 

But just now, I think I'm again feeling inspired to continue with the scanning and blogging of the postcards... I'm just about to reach the time (winter 1902/03) when Gustaf (the postcard-collector) and his sister Gerda (writer of many of the cards) both emigrated to the US. (He went Pennsylvania, she to Chicago.)

If you're interested, there are permanent links to the Greetings from the Past blog in the sidebar of this one.

Preserve Your Memories

Today is Mother's Day in Sweden. (Here, that's always the last Sunday in May.) This year, it coincides with the exact date when my own mother died - 26th May, 2009. 

I had started my first blog a few months earlier, in January that year. Going back there now, I find that I wrote a short post about it two days later: Life is fragile. 

The years that followed were rather chaotic, as my dad was not well either, and he died two years later. 

Looking back now from further down the road, I'm still thankful that I had started blogging (and making some online friends) some time before all that happened. Blogging has been helpful through the ups and downs in all sorts of ways: Sometimes to sum up what is happening; and at other times, to forget about it for a while. And in retrospect, I also find it helpful sometimes to be able to go back and check what I did (or didn't) write at a certain point in time.

 Photo of my parents, taken by a friend of theirs in 2007.

Always reminding me of these lyrics by Paul Simon:

Old Friends

...

Can you imagine us
Years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy

Old friends
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fear

Time it was
And what a time it was
It was . . .
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Long ago . . . it must be . . .
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you