Rosy vision of youth

I received my first birthday card yesterday, predictably from my mom, who included this picture along with the greeting:

What's funny, aside from my expression, is that I have no idea when this photograph was taken. Oh, by the looks of the season and my haircut and the length of my legs, I'm guessing it was the summer of 1979, which would make me about 3 years old. But I have never seen this picture before, have no memory or story associated with it, which is highly unusual for someone who has kept as many photo albums as I have; someone who has insisted Mommy tell her again about how I made the pig face or screamed in Grandma's ear after she drove four hours down to visit. Every photograph has a story, and I thought I knew them all by now.

But this was new to me, if only it weren't so familiar.

Isn't this just the picture of suburban life in the late 1970's? The pink and yellow chaise lounge, rust building at the hinges, positioned on the brick patio to get the last drop of sun as it set across the street. The birdfeeder in the background that would get uprooted ten years later for a deck extending from the back of the house. The narrow garden along the line of the basement, sprouting sparse but significant signs of life. I hold a wooden clothespin in my chubby hand.

This was the house I grew up in, the house my mom lived in until 2003, when she finally sold it and moved to something smaller in a neighboring town. But in 1979, we had lived there for less than two years. My parents were still married, and I'm guessing, fulfilling someone's dream of family life in suburbia. My mom was not even 29, and still five years away from starting her own business, but she was probably more of an adult then than I am now.

By the time I moved out for college, weeds obscured much of the brick in the patio. The deck had been instrumental in the tanning needs of my teenage years, but eventually required more upkeep than we could manage. The clothesline had been removed with the birdfeeder years before, and while we did keep a garden for many years, that, too demanded more attention than either of us wanted to give. Eventually, it was forgotton and left to grow in, just the way the rest of the memories have been clouded by age and change.

"I've been missing you a lot lately", my mom wrote in the card. She couldn't have known back then that her only child would one day move so far away. She couldn't have imagined anything except a rosy-hued future, what with everything one could want literally in her own back yard.

Or could she? Was she worried then about her marriage or about work or that she was subjected to the suburbs, defying the picture-perfect image of Pleasantville? Is it possible that not every picture is worth 1000 words, or tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I can't help but wonder about the story behind this photo.

I miss her greatly, of course, as well as the days when she was all I needed on a summer afternoon. Before the landscape of our lives changed and sent me down a different, so very distant path. Things seemed so much simpler then. Although I'm sure "simple" tells only half the story.