Please Enjoy my Grandparents Kissing

February 19, 2015, Purps, Coffee Talk, , 2

 

These are my grandparents on my father’s side. I am convinced that they were the cutest thing ever, even if I didn’t get to witness them being cute myself.

I discovered this picture last year when I was preparing for my wedding. Look around on Pintrest and you’ll find a gazillion lists of cute things to do at your wedding. Almost every one of them includes a memory table or a memorial of some kind to the people who can’t be there with you. I am big into family history and the opportunity to show off where I came from, to learn about my family and my new family was not to be missed. I wanted to not only honor the memories of those who couldn’t be with us, but to celebrate the marriages that had made ours possible.

I love old pictures. I love most things that are old, but pictures especially. Pictures tell a story, they open a window into the past so you can peek at what people were like 20, 50, 100 years ago. My family has a copy of a picture of my dad’s parents from when they were dating that sat in a cracked-pane picture from for as long as I can remember. And for as long as I can remember I thought they were the cutest couple ever. That was also the only picture I had ever seen of my grandmother, until last year.

We went to my Aunt Peggy’s where the old family album lives. It’s in rough condition, as is the way of old family albums, and pictures have a tendency to escape, but it lives on, nonetheless. We opened it up on the kitchen table, Aunt Peggy, Mom, my best friend, Twirls, and I, and flipped through the yellowed pages. The hour or two we spent looking through those pictures may have been my favorite part of wedding planning. Maybe even more than finding my dress.

As cheesy as it sounds, in that album holds a history of love. Pictures of my grandparents lined the pages with smiles and loving gazes. They look so happy in each picture they’re in together. You can tell by the way he looked at her that he was mad about her. Their wedding pictures were fuzzy and small, but happy. The album holds pictures of their dating, their wedding, their early marriage and their kids. It has newspaper clippings and invitations and programs preserved in it’s pages.

I know that they weren’t always as happy as they looked in those pictures. I realize that they had hard times like everyone does. But it is so clear that they loved each other more than anything. And I suspect that if they were still alive today, they would still be in love.

So my husband and I have quite the legacy to live up to. We are the result of a history of love in which my grandparents are just one branch. As I’ve been looking through the pictures we scanned that day last

year and combing through my own wedding pictures I appreciate more than ever the life they contributed to me through their example. In fifty years when our grandchildren are looking back at our family album, falling apart as it should be, I want them to pick out a photo and say “My grandparents were the cutest thing ever.”

1940s, family, grandparents, history, love, marriage, pictures, romance, wedding

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