elegantly dressed mystery

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Ever since July, when I was given this cache of pictures, I've wanted to do a little series about Clara. I'm starting here, not with the first picture that made me realise she was special, but with the best of the lot - and the most mysterious (... or is it..?). I love it because of the contrasts, of course; and the contrast between the contrasts in the people and the lesser constrasts in everything else (as if the camera just knew); the way they seem to be suspended in nothing, as if they are all that really exists; and the fact that it looks like a still from a play. What was happening? Why the doctor's wife? Why is Ed's brother so impossibly handsome?? (and why couldn't he have just moved forward one inch?) The doctor's wife is wonderful.

Clara is the first hint (to me, I mean) of the little industrial/farming village of Sidney, in Delaware County, NY, containing something beyond its presented self. You'll see, later: Ed, too, is a sweet, otherworldly thing in his hornrims and long cardigans. A picture I didn't post up today, but thought of doing, features my dad, holding a black dog, sitting next to his marvellous bicycle in 1938 - and just out of frame, sitting on the proch, some unknown person with huge, sturdy, working-man's knees and the beefiest hands sitting on them that I have ever seen. The wrists themselves are poignant. My grandfather worked in a factory that made airplane parts for Boeing; my dad's Uncle Kenneth had a farm.

Sidney is a town at the northernmost edge of the Appalachian mountain range, and in many ways it's like the southern end, or was: people were poor, lived by their hands and the land, made things they couldn't afford to buy (which resulted in the equivalent of folk art: patchwork quilts, crocheted bedspreads you could never buy, they are so intricate), listened to the same kind of music as down south (I remember being tortured by the music my grandparents' listened to, and the TV shows! Hee Haw, Lawrence Welk. But the thing is, it was totally authentic. I couldn't realise that at the time.) Nobody ever read books; well, I remember Reader's Digest condensed omnibus editions about the place. There's another photo, of Grandma ironing in an apron, with an open door behind her showing the beyond of telegraph wires and trees. I remember lying awake on summer nights up there, listening to the freight train whistles as they rattled through on the other side of town: long, incredibly lonely-sounding whistles.

Well, I'm sure I'll get to these other pictures, and they are wonderful. Aunt Ruby in her sensible dress and her kitty-cat glasses. But they are how we always thought of that place. Clara is something else. Look at these people! They had wonderful hats. They knew how to stand. And they're on probably the same porch the man with the beefy wrists would later sit on. It might be Grandpa; it definitely isn't Ed.

In green, Clara has written all around this picture's border: Me; Ed's brother; the doctor's wife; and "Ed. He is the dearest boy ever lived."

Now, I can't remember who she is or why she's related to us. Sis, you reading this? I can't remember her last name, which I think was kind of long, or hyphenated, or Austrian-sounding. And there is a rumour that she left poor Ed and ran off to Canada with the handyman.