And another thing...

Memories in color.



This is a picture of me, taken during the time I was in foster care.

There are only about a half dozen pictures of me when I was young. My mother tells me that I hated to get my picture taken. I still hate it. I know why I hate it now, I take crappy pictures. But I don�t have any idea why I didn�t like it then, I was adorable.

We had gone to a Christmas concert, I was wearing one of the �real� daughters� shoes and they were too small. I had taken one of them off and I was trying desperately to cram it back on my big fat foot, when a photographer from the paper snapped my picture. The caption read �Oh, my darn shoe�. I remember that to this day even though the actually newspaper article has been lost for years.

There is something else interesting about this photo. When I was in grade 7, our teacher decided that a fun class activity would be for the students to bring childhood photos of themselves and have the others guess who they were from those photos. When it was my turn to post my photo on the bulletin board, I looked up and there was the photo. Only it wasn�t mine, I was holding mine. Someone else had taken in the exact same photo. I showed the teacher and she was floored. The photo turned out to have been brought in by one of my friends. Heidi, she is the girl sitting on my left.

Its so funny because I can tell you everything about that little red haired girl sitting next to me, I know what color dress she was wearing, (red) and the shoes. (I couldn�t tell you a thing about what I was wearing).

I remember those shoes. They are the reason I had taken mine off. They were red suede with little bows on the top. As soon as I laid eyes on them I fell in love. I begged her to let me try them on, and of course they didn�t fit. I was so disappointed and that is why I look so sad in the photo.

Even though the photo is in black and white, I always knew that that little girl was red headed with a red dress and red shoes. My sister had always said, �you were five, you don�t remember what color dress some kid sitting next to you had on.�, but Heidi had also brought some color photos in from the same night. I was right.

Somehow that makes me happy and sad at the same time. Happy, of course, that I really did remember correctly things that happened to me during that time in foster care, and sad for the exact same reason.