in love.

i hope i never get over this feeling of awe i have over being in paris.
there are so few things in life that bring me this much joy.
every time i have come i have been acutely aware that i am,
In. Paris.
i feel like a kid on christmas morn..

when i am rich i will have an apartment here.
i will come every summer,
i will fall in love and bring my children here and every time it will feel like christmas morn..
even in the middle of summer.
maybe we will stay til the leaves turn red and brown and orange
and fall from the trees.
maybe we will stay for christmas.

but one is faded,

such is life

these two photos caused me to be distracted enough to leave my overnight things in my grampa's car. which was a terrible thing, but not in the way you'd think.

in sunlight.

i love this one. on the empty bus.

Oh Margaret.

my dear beautiful gramma, Margaret
who thought she was never pretty and actually winced when she saw this shot.
she's with her sister Helen (centre), and my great gramma grumpypants Martha, who just died recently at one hundred and four.
when they were young, gramma was very skinny and gangly legged, which wasn't in fashion, and had glassses, whereas Helen was a bit curvier and didn't.
everyone always raved about how pretty Helen was...
but not gramma.
it makes me so sad.
gramma was always at the top of her class in high school. she says her school principal yelled at her in front of everyone when she said she wasn't going to university.
she couldn't go to uni because her dad wanted her to get a job and give the family (him, Helen, grumpypants) TEN DOLLARS a week.  they needed it.
her dad worked in the bleach factory for not enough pay and before that he'd been a miner. he proceeded to die too young and leave my gramma with only Helen and grumpypants for company. it's all a little bit Cinderella.
i think this is even gramma's wedding day (her first marriage, not to grampa, story for another day),
and she is standing off to one side and Helen is in the middle.
and gramma made her own dress while Helen's was bought for her by her parents.
such deliberate neglect.
also,
gramma made herself a violin when she was a teenager that her music teacher played and said had a lovely sound. it got burnt up in a house fire which started with faulty wiring in the corner where the violin sat.
i always wished i could have heard it sing.

Victor Douglas Harwood (my grampa)

My dear grandfather.
I love you so much...

While i've been in Canada i've been learning more about grampa's life before he met my gramma, and also random scientific facts..
For instance, did you know, most plants are made up of three things, cellulose, hemi-cellulose, and lignin?
Grampa has a phD in science, but when he talks to me he tells me baby facts and says things very slowly, emphasizing the syllables in words he thinks i might not know.
Lig-NIN.
i'm twenty-eight now. i love him to bits. he is a crotchety old stickler at times, but as kind as god.
i speak slowly to him because his ears do not hear so well since his heart attack a few years back.
i love the face he's making in the shot above.
he walks much more slowly now then i remember and he is more hunched.
he has had every terrible thing imaginable happen to his physical body in the five years since i last saw him.
but his mind is fine.
he remembers paying eleven hundred dollars for an Austin car in 1952 because his friend had one, and he had let him drive it...
lol. boys.
apparently his income at that point was about thirty five hundred a year but living expenses were low.
at that particular time in his life he was working for a company where his job was to analyse how much DDT residue was left on fruit when it reached the consumer.
hardly any, he says.

tiny joy

My gramma's 8mm camera. It was purchased in 1963 on a cruise when they had only four of the seven children. gramma says she had a very basic one before this.
the cruise cost $500 for four kids (leanne, my mum, john and billy) and my grandparents.
the Zeiss cost $100.
wowee.