This is my one of my all time favorite pictures of my mom. While staying at my folks empty house I have been ... well, snooping and I came across this disc of photos. It's 1964 in Vermont and my dad, Max, has dragged my mom, Diana, to the Isle Le Motte to collect fossils while finishing his PhD from Colombia in paleontology. For several summers in my parents' young married life, they lived in a tent and later an abandoned farm house with their little babies, Steve and Shauna, ages 1 and 2. My oldest brother and sister are Irish twins born 11 months apart during the first 2 years of marriage in New York City. Mom says they were so poor in Harlem that she would only have enough money to buy two bananas. She would send on to school with my dad and split the other in half for the babies. She was left licking the inside of the banana peels. I love that story. Happily, I can report that things are now much better financially and my mom can eat several bananas a day.
I think they were a swell couple at BYU. Dad says the first thing he noticed about my mom was that she could play Clare De Lune on the piano and that she made that button-up cardigan look GOOD. (Only he says it a little differently. Wink, wink.)
Last year my dad's research was used to create the Goodsell Ridge Fossil Preserve and Outdoor Museum on Isle La Motte, VT. Now children everywhere can enjoy the striation of exposed stromatoporoids, large cabbage like creatures now, sadly, long extinct just like baby Stevie did when he lived in a tent with his exhausted mother. Here in the world oldest exposed reef, kids can frolic on a complex and diverse grouping of lithistid sponges, tabulate corals and bryozoa. I think we should plan a family vacation to see my dad's environmental reserve. Who knew?
Below, my manly dad and baby Stevie; two men with the wind in their hair and the sun on their backs.
Because, at the end of the day, places like Isle Le Motte help us to enter into other epochs of Earth's History, to begin to grasp the unfathomable idea of deep time where millions of years become hours and human life on earth a scant few minutes. How is that for an inconvenient truth?
4 comments:
wow. what an awesome life. i used to romanticize being marriage and young and poor because of stories like that.
now we're apartment managing and it kinda sucks and i don't think my daughters will be blogging about it in thirty years.
I know! What tramatic and exciting thing can we put our family through to create long lasting memories? I want to take my kids to 100 museums in 100 days and write a book about it.
I love your mom's hair. She's so stylish. I like your blog too. You always have something new and exciting to say. Check out www.sugarcityjournal.blogspot.com
Yea, it's Melissa! My mom is still style gorgeous. It all comes from my hip grandma Zina who grew up in Kanab Utah but didn't want anyone to be able to tell.
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