Welcome to Week 100 of Memory Monday! This time I’m going to be very self-absorbed and share a collection of old prints from my childhood that I have up on my office wall. Unfortunately, most of them have faded badly (my fault, I know!), but thanks to my scanner I was able to somewhat restore their colors and preserve them in digital form. Some of these may have appeared in the blog before, whether as prints or slides, but I’ll try to arrange them in a rough sort of chronological order below…

I must have been about two years old here; I don’t remember which of my parents’ friends we were visiting, and I was certainly no Mozart, but I still had fun playing around on the piano while my sisters looked on.

Visiting Sue-Meg State Park (formerly known as Patrick’s Point), 1966

Sitting in my uncle’s back yard with cousin Gary; he’s one year younger than me, and he’s wearing an adhesive bandage on his forehead

Christmas 1966

This picture was taken at our church Sunday school, and I must have been 5 or 6 years old

My school picture from kindergarten; I could have sworn this dress was red, not yellow!

My sisters and I with our Grandma (standing behind me) and her friend Charlotte Cudd in 1967. I love this image because Grandma died only four years later, when I was ten.

These two pictures were taken at the same time, during a 1967 visit to another of Grandma’s friends who I knew as “Grandma Pat.” She lived in a retirement community called Leisure World in Seal Beach, near Los Angeles.

I’m not sure where or when the above photo was taken, but it’s one of my favorites — and I remember wearing this green and white checked dress for my second-grade school picture in 1968.

Two photos taken in Mexico — I think the top was taken in 1968 while stopped overnight at a motel in Chihuahua.

Shopping in Mexico City with Hortensia, Summer 1969. My family stayed at her house for a few days, and she was kind enough to look after me while my parents were busy. We rode the bus to the mercado, where she bought me some handmade dollhouse furniture. Years later, I looked at this photo and was shocked at how young she looked — now I know she was in her early 20s, but as an 8-year-old, I was convinced Hortensia was a middle-aged lady!