Old Photo Album I Found at an Antiques Store

By Sadie Benjamin, 16, Illinois

You, holding the baby, crouching in a meadow, a child yourself. 

Your father: straight short hair, dark suit, slow face. Here he is holding you, here he is with your mother. 

Your mother. Tall; fair hair in neat knots. Four children with a man she taught herself to love. Does she think of him easily at night? Does she long for him six years later when he has gone to fight? 

Baby pulls the wagon through a dustbowl of a field at midday. 

Now see four men with rifles criss-cross on the ground, women leaning behind them and squinting through the sun. Wall like a crutch. Two angles; in both you are fixing your skirt. One leg kicked up behind you on the wall, boyish posture, back arching. Stomach forward. 

Here again the porch. 

A boy with glasses by a tree, smiling. 

Your mother, in a coat, nightgown underneath, standing surprised and lonesome before the barn door. 

You and your father two feet apart, you stand, he sits. September 1936. Somewhere in the prairie plains of Iowa in the tepid fall air of 1936, your mother was squinting at glass and you were staring down the barrel of the camera while your father tried desperately to hold you. 

All six of you at the gatepost. Clean faces, hands, nails, hair brushed and soft, good Sunday clothes and placid smiles from the four determined children, the fidgeting mother and father like ghosts with grins stamped across their faces. You stand by your mother. One hand on the gatepost and the other at your side. 

Later, you six are just five. You are old now and have long clean hair like the rushes you picked from the pond. Dark dresses, pressed shirts. A funeral. Your hands on your brothers’ shoulders, your face still aching from a joy long gone. 

Clouds above you. Dry air like prairie fire on your skin.

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I’ve always loved looking at old photographs and speculating about the lives of the people in them; I find it most interesting when the photographs are old enough and distant enough that the time and place it was taken in would feel foreign to me. I was in a thrift store in rural Iowa when I came across an old family photo album–a family I didn’t know, and wasn’t related to–spanning roughly 1936-1942. It showed a tumultuous period in the life of a family, covering the tail end of the Great Depression on a farm in the plains of Iowa all the way into the middle of WWII. Looking through its pages I found myself drawn in particular to what seemed to be the eldest daughter of the family. It was strange to see her grow up through the lens of her parents’ camera, and as an older sister myself I couldn’t help but wonder what she was like in life. I wanted to humanize the black-and-white face in the photographs. I wanted to know what she might have thought about, and all the ways we might have been different, and all the ways we might have been the same. History is funny like that. We’re all much closer than we think we are in the grand scheme of things.

Instagram: @sadie.benj_