Pieces of Photographs

FACE TO FACE

Pieces of Photographs

Katherine Baylis

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, 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 grandma liked to call them "fishy cookies") and the answer is always a resounding yes. In the photo, I have on bright red rain boots while my cousin Will dons a denim bucket hat. The real reason this photo gets dragged out of a shoebox every year is our facial expressions. Somehow, a serene moment was captured as we stared inquiringly at each other. My grandpa referred to the picture as “the summit,” as though we were world leaders engaged in serious discussion.

I do not recall much from that early an age, but I highly doubt we were serene much of the time. I would not be surprised if one of us threw the Goldfish crackers at the other moments after this photo was taken. Will is three years younger than me for most of the year, but for a brief period between May and September, we are two years apart in age. Lizzie, his sister who is five years younger than me, wasn’t born yet when this photo was taken. Our yearly family vacations were a testament to our mothers’ close friendship and sisterhood.

My earliest memories of summers with Will (because even after Lizzie was born, she was still a baby and didn’t do much) were mainly testing each other’s boundaries and patience. I think we played nice most of the time, but even then, he liked to be right, and I didn’t like to be told what to do. The one argument I can recall most vividly was when he was perhaps four and I was six, and we couldn’t agree on what to name our inflatable hippo water toy. The hippo was blue with purple polka dots and huge cartoon eyes. I’m not sure what I had initially named him—I think maybe it was Henry—but Will decided his name was Hippy the Hippo. I was not happy. I remember my mom telling me I could call the hippo whatever I wanted when they weren’t there since we lived closer and were at the lake house more frequently, but that holding my ground on this wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

There is another photo taken next to our grandparents’ lake house the summer we visited Mt. Washington. It’s very similar to another photo taken at the top of the mountain featuring the three cousins with big, cheesy smiles. For whatever reason, there’s a certain age where kids don’t quite grasp the concept of a smile yet and instead just bare their teeth to the camera with a wild, giddy look and this photo is a prime example. By contrast, I seem to be unintentionally mirroring my grandpa’s smile, which is closed and a little reserved. In the photo, my grandpa has his arm around me, and my grandma’s holding Will close to her with Lizzie squished in the middle.

To an outside observer, I think we might look a bit stiff from the way we’re standing, but all I see is contentment, pride in my grandparents’ expressions. My grandma babysat me frequently as a child and taught me to say things like, “I don’t care for that” when she made food I didn’t like and to say “pardon” instead of “what” if someone said something I didn’t hear. My grandpa liked to tease my grandma when she’d fuss about things at dinner or forget some detail in a story she was telling and then he’d look across the table at me with this knowing smirk like it was our little inside joke. I remember when I would come downstairs on an early summer morning when no one else was awake yet, he’d put down his book and coffee to get me a glass of orange juice, let me sit with him in his chair and try to teach me to play Sudoku.

Most of my impressions and memories of my cousins and me as kids were from around this time. We chased the ice cream truck barefoot down the street in dripping-wet swimsuits. Our favorite trips into town were to a bakery called The Yum Yum Shop that smelled of gingerbread and fresh apple turnovers. Will liked trains and boats and fishing. He’d chase me around the yard with one of the live worms that he’d bought at the tackle shop with our grandpa at 6 a.m. that morning, and I’d shriek at the icky, squirming thing. He’d usually offer to help put the worm on the hook for me once he was done terrorizing me with it. I remember our parents usually let us sort out arguments on our own—my mom liked that I got exposure to what it was like to have siblings. When Lizzie was little, she usually followed me around and copied everything I did, much to my annoyance. Will and Lizzie fought a lot, and I often played mediator, though I tended to take Lizzie’s side if things got physical, although I now suspect she was often the instigator.

When I look at another photo, all I can see is change. Will finally grew taller than me. Lizzie has braces. My hair is much longer, and I had just started to wear makeup. Unlike the earlier photo, this was not a spur of the moment grabthe-kids-and-pull-them-together type of photo. This was planned for hours, perhaps even a day or two beforehand. I know this because my grandpa is in his electric wheelchair. Unlike all the summers before this one where my grandparents would bustle about the lake house, my grandma in the kitchen and my grandpa mowing the lawn or grilling burgers and hot dogs, this summer was heavier. We got brief, scheduled visits with my grandparents when my grandpa felt well enough to come see us. He had been diagnosed with ALS two years prior. We’re all laughing in this photo. I think my grandpa had said something snarky and been chided by my grandma moments before the photo was taken because he’s holding in a schemer’s laugh and looks very proud of himself.

This was the summer I was obsessed with photography and dragged my cousins into my ventures to take the perfect photo, much to their annoyance. I loved trying to photograph rain most of all and one evening as a beautiful storm was sweeping across the lake, Will stood in a torrential downpour with me holding a towel over my head so I could capture the perfect shot. This was the summer Lizzie and I decided we wanted to get good at doing cartwheels. We never did.

Our summer priorities and activities shuffled a bit throughout high school. I started bringing a full keyboard up to the lake with me every time I visited so that I could keep up my practicing. Will found a local swim team to practice with when he was at the lake, so that he wouldn’t get out of shape. Lizzie’s schedule didn’t really start getting really busy until she was in high school, but she still had soccer camps to schedule around. The summer before my senior year, I remember trying to memorize piano pieces to use as audition material for college music programs. My teacher had me learn a Brahms Intermezzo to offset the two heavier ones, and I fell in love with it.

I forget why, but Will stole my phone and snapped about a dozen selfies of the three of us squished in the backseat of our grandma’s Ford Explorer. In the photo we’re all smiling, but Will looks rather pleased with himself, Lizzie looks confused and vaguely annoyed, and I look very caught off guard. I have piano sheet music on my lap— Brahms Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 2. We had just been at the church practicing so I could play it in our grandpa’s memorial service.

This was the first summer without my grandpa. My uncle cooked on the grill and my mom helped us buy bait at the tackle shop early in the morning. When my grandma told an endless, fragmented story, no one teasingly interrupted or corrected.

Perhaps one of my favorite photos of my cousins and me was taken on Easter morning on the steps of my cousins’ new house in Kansas during my freshman year of college. I have a copy of it framed on my bureau. My aunt, knowing how expensive flights home to New England would be, had offered to fly me down the short trip from Chicago to Kansas for the long weekend. We had tried to recreate one of my grandma’s favorite photos of us from one of Will and Lizzie’s childhood swim meets. Will and I, being the tallest, had carried Lizzie between us with her arms around our necks. It was quite difficult to accomplish the same result with all of us pushing 5’10 and much less willing to get our nice clothes dirty. Will and I had a hard time coordinating how to pick Lizzie up (he still likes to be right, and I still don’t like to be told what to do) and in the moment that was captured, we’re all laughing, Lizzie most of all, though that’s probably due in part to us dropping her. We did a similar recreation when I visited them for Easter the year after, though I can’t tell from the cropping if we cheated and had Lizzie stand on something instead.

Once Will and I were both in college and Lizzie had started high school sports, our summer vacations overlapped less and less. We pivoted to seeing each other at Thanksgiving or Christmas rather than trying to find the magic oneweek window that worked for all our shifting summer schedules. Lizzie and I texted frequently during the school year, and we’d catch each other up when I saw her in person. I remember sitting on our twin beds in our shared room at the lake house one summer, which seemed smaller every year, and telling her about a hard semester I’d had at college. She looked at me and said with unflinching certainty that she was on my side. My first summer out of college I remember talking to Will on the phone a lot during his frequent drives from his internship in Cleveland to his parents’ house in Kansas. He’d tell me about his work in automotive engineering, and I’d tell him about my new job in publishing and neither of us fully understood the other’s job, but we each made an effort to learn and be supportive.

It’s strange to think that I haven’t spent a summer with my cousins in a couple years, though COVID is largely to blame for that. But unlike when we were kids, I no longer worry about what I’m missing out on. If I decide to call one of them randomly on a walk or a long drive, they’ll usually pick up. We still plan and scheme together before family get-togethers and once we’re all together, we’ll pile in Will’s car to run random errands, and it’ll feel like nothing’s changed. Summer is no longer a certainty, but our friendship is.