Dear Sheddists,
today's beauty is a bitter-sweet thing - a series of photographs from an album I had long forgotten.
My father was a keen amateur photographer. I can remember as a small boy standing beside him in his make-shift dark-room, watching filmy paper dipped in chemicals take on shadows and form. He died much too young and my mother instigated a Ground Zero cleansing of his pictures in response.
I managed to rescue just a few. Years later I made up an album and gave it to my mother the last time she spent Christmas with us. There were photographs in it that were difficult. Photographs of my sister, Hilary who pedaled her cycle behind a bus in answer to her Godfather, our family doctor, waving to her from across the road. She never made it to the other side.
I gave her the album in a quiet room in our house on her own. There were tears. Twenty years on she was deep under the influence of morphine as I by sat by her side and listened to her relive those horrific moments as she sat in a ghostly hospital waiting-room to be told the news.
The album was tucked away at the back of her cupboard. She was about to throw it away and I rescued the photos once more. I got out it out today to scan some photos for my elder brother and here they are, still covered in tears.
Yours as ever,
electrofried(mr)
