Saturday's Old Photo

I promise that after this, I'll give you a break from pictures of my childhood. This photo features, once again, my sister and me. My sister is the one hiding right behind the tire swing. In last weeks' photo, I was probably ten or so, and she was seven or eight. In this one, I'd say I'm 14 and, since it looks like it's fall, she's probably just turned 12.

I'm holding my cat Rusty, who'd been hit by a car and lived to tell about it, but as a result, one leg was grotesquely mangled. Perhaps it could have been set properly if he'd seen a vet right away, but he didn't come home until two weeks after his accident. We'd been told of the incident by the woman who hit him. She was pretty sure she'd killed him, and since we couldn't find him anywhere, we assumed he was dead. Then one day, a couple of weeks later, Rusty showed up at home dangling one leg. He managed well on his three good ones, and I loved him all the same, so he spent the rest of his cat years quite happily.

The tree we're standing by was my favorite tree--a huge willow that was perfect for a tire swing and perfect for climbing. I climbed it quite regularly, up as far as the branches would hold my weight, which was high enough that if it were my kid up there, I'd be having a heart attack. I continued to climb it until I was sixteen or so, and then climbed it once later after I was grown just to prove to my future husband that I still could.

But this post is really about the location of the picture. This building next to the tree is Solway Log Chapel in Solway, Minnesota (now called Solway Bible Chapel, and no longer sided with logs), where my father was pastor from the time I was twelve until I graduated from high school. The house you see in the background is the parsonage where we lived. So in this series of photos, you've seen my sister and I together by three different churches, and in each case, we lived in the parsonage next door. Ours was the typical life of the small church pastor's children back in the sixties and seventies, playing all around (but never in!) our church. We knew pretty much everything that went on in the church, not because anyone blabbed to us, but because we lived right next door. Unless we were sick, we were at whatever services were appropriate for us because we lived right next door.