KATHERINE BAYLIS
Pieces of Photographs
F A CE T O FACE
I’ve always thought of summer as more of a concept than an actual season. If I were to acknowledge the weather of June through August as the sole definition of “summer,” then I would have to say I very much dislike it. But I always enjoyed summer growing up, mainly because of what it represented: no school and more time with family. The highlight of every summer was always the week or two that I would see my cousins. Some years it was the only time I’d see them, so we tried to make the most of every minute. There’s a line in Tennessee William’s play The Glass Menagerie that goes, “In memory, everything seems to happen to music.” I carry a similarly romanticized notion of my childhood summers that expands in and out of focus depending on the year. My memories of summer are akin to an eclectic pile of photos,
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conversations, locations, sounds and faces. Most of them converge at my grandparents’ lake house on Lake Winnipesaukee (NH) strung together by stories of my cousins and our adventures. As a life-long scrapbooker, I love collecting fragments and mementos and then finding a way to tell a story with them. Thus, the most fitting tool for navigating through my summers seems to be through describing a handful of memorable photographs. Every year, when my grandma wants to tell us a story about how cute my cousins Will and Lizzie and I were when we were little, she pulls out a particular photo. We are each sitting in one of those tiny folding chairs made for toddlers and eating Goldfish crackers. Every year my grandma asks if I still like Goldfish (my grandpa liked to call them “fishy cookies”) and the answer is
