Picture Monday!

Well, here we go the bginning of another week. I managed to make it through the weekend all in one piece. That actually makes me sound quite a bit more exciting than I really am. I spent the weekend doing work around the house and hanging out with the dogs....

This Monday I have some pictures to share with you that are very special to me. This coming Easter Sunday is my Grandfather's 93rd birthday. Growing up I lived in a small town in middle America and my whole family and pretty much everyone that I had ever known lived in that one town, including my paternal grandparents. Now, our family was not the type of family that was open and emotional and hugged everyone. They were farmers who raised Angus cattle, corn, and pigs. They had been through hard times and I don't think to this day I have ever seen either my granfather or my father ever cry. That was just their way, but you knew that they loved you. Well, you figured it out eventually.

Growing up in a family like mine if you want to know something about someone you have to ask because they sure aren't volunteering it. All through my highschool and college days I was too busy, or cool, or angry to ask. Now that I have gotten a little older and I have come to realize that they are who they are and that is all that they will ever be, I started to realize just how much I may never know about them. That is something that I wish I would have learned sooner in life, that absolutely everyone has a story worth hearing.

So, in an effort to try to get to spend some time with them and get to know them better, I decided to do some portraits of them when I was home for Christmas last year. I began to realize that even though time is rushing by unchecked for me, they won't always be around. Now let me just say, that they are a couple of charachters and sometimes they make me crazy, but I love them. Lately, a lot of my memories of them have been the making me crazy kind of stuff (like how grandma is diabetic but refuses to check her blood sugar and will go all day eating only a Little Debbie apple fritter and orange juice then gets sick and we have to take her to the emergency room - again). I did not want those memories to be the ones I would be carrying around, so I set out to photograph them in a way that reminded me of the best of them - a best that they are sure is in the past for them but isn't.