2020-Favorite Photo

Picking a single favorite photo of a family member is nearly impossible for me, as I'm sure it is for many of you who are also participating in this writing exercise.  I love taking photographs, and when I look at photos, even ones I haven't taken, I often spend time studying the person and their surroundings, trying to imagine that instant in time when the photo was snapped.  What was the occasion?  What were they thinking about?  Who else was there out of the frame of the camera?  Or in some cases, who the heck are these other people with my relative?   Also, because I am our "official" family photographer, I've learned that I am often not present in the photos of our family events, a problem I've tried to remedy by lots of whining....

Papias Peru Moskal circa 1953

In any event, after an inordinate amount of time studying my collection of photos, I've selected this photo of my Mexican nana, Papias Peru Moskal (1888-1967).  In it, she is sitting on a stool at her kitchen table in El Paso, making tamales, it appears.  She is smiling, and it looks to me like it was snapped while she was engaged in a conversation with someone else in the room, probably my mother, enjoying herself while she worked.

I like this photo because I remember sitting as a very young child, maybe 2-3 years old, at that table with the oil cloth tablecloth, on the end near that hot water heater, while Nana would make flour tortillas, heating them in a skillet, and slathering them with butter for me to eat.  There was often a manual meat grinder attached to that table.  I am so emotionally attached to that image that I've kept the one my husband's grandparents owned in a box in my basement for years...just because.  No plans to use it; I have a modern one that attaches to my stand mixer.  Just because it reminds me of my nana and those flour tortillas.

That's the power of a photograph to evoke memories from an image that can make us time travelers.