Wedding photo of Carl Oscar Swanson and Thelma Linnea Robertson
September 17, 1931
Great Grandpa Oscar and Great Grandma Thelma - that's who they were to me, and here's what they looked like by the time they earned those titles.
Grandma Thelma crocheted. My daughter's closet is home to a couple yellow capes Grandma made, and I think my mother still has the green blanket that graced our couches all through my childhood. Grandma also kept a plastic baby doll (that, if memory serves, she acquired through saving box tops) for me to play with. It came with a yellow plastic carrier. My daughter inherited both when she was born in 2015. We called the doll 'Baby Thelma.'
Grandpa Oscar taught me to play rummy. For some reason, the smell of the tobacco aisle (before tobacco products had to be stored behind the register) at Walgreens always reminded me of him. The whiff of a good cigar has a similar effect. My mom says he didn't smoke cigars (though his father-in-law did), but there's something about the aroma that takes me back to Grandma and Grandpa Swanson's house.
Their Chicago house had the old-style air vents - large, grated squares cut directly into the flooring. I remember a gold coin in the vent in their dining room. Maybe they put it there for me to find (the same way my dad leaves change all over his house when my daughter visits), or maybe it is one of those fabricated memories - the kind that seems so real but that no one else remembers.
I only knew great grandma and grandpa Swanson as the elderly people holding me in these photos. I didn't really know what they looked like as young adults until I inherited my grandmother's (great grandpa's daughter) photos several years back and found this wedding portrait. I love it for many reasons - its simplicity, Great Grandma's bouquet - but mostly, I appreciate being able to view them 50 years before my existence.
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