Mailboxes along the roads
and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds
often served as landmarks in rural Montana.
These landmarks told us where we were,
and how far we had to go.
Sometimes they signaled “home”  and the end of the road.
At other times,
barely visible through swirling snow,
they told us we had miles to go.
When I started writing the word pictures to tell the stories of growing up on the farm, I realized that these stories, just like those barns and mailboxes that stood along our country roads, still identify places on the road, still seem to inform me about  where I am and how far I have to go. 
In 1953 and 1958, refrigerator surfaces were not used to display family pictures, notes from grandchildren, or school photos of second graders held in place by cute little magnets.
The kitchen was a place of intense activity with cupboard doors, refrigerator doors, and oven doors being opened and shut a hundred times a day in the process of baking, cooking, setting meals, cleaning up after meals, thawing meat out for tomorrow’s meals and spreading out Farm Journals and handwritten recipes to plan new desserts and vegetable dishes for the next big family gathering.  It was a great day when the ladies discovered that crumbled potato chips made for a great topping on almost any casserole. Lots to learn.  Lots to enjoy.
Mom ordered a copy of Cooking with Gail, a suitable cookbook for a youngster.  Gail was a farm girl in Iowa whose mother was teaching her the homemaking arts, step by step.  They gathered the recipes and the instructions in a simple spiral bound cookbook that was sold through the Farm Journal. To this day, her directions for apple pie and for simple chicken/turkey dressing are what gets it done in my kitchen..
The kitchens of those day sputtered, boiled, melted, froze, pureed, fried, baked, creamed and processed all manner of photogenic goodies, almost 24/7, year round, but neither the kitchens nor the refrigerators were considered the place to display valued family photos.
Photographs were precious.  Most people had a supply of black and white dating back thirty-plus years.  So the old photo albums came into play with the little triangular attachment thingies that damaged the corners.  Later on, other types of materials were provided, guaranteed not to damage your photos the way the sticky corner things did, and true to their claims, they damaged the photos in a different way–or just failed after a couple of months so that when you re-opened your photo album, all of the carefully arranged record of eighth grade or your 1957 Chevrolet At The Class Picnic all slid out on the floor, having coming loose from their placement.
As color photographs became available, every family who had a piano displayed the family photos in a row across the piano.  Those who didn’t have a piano arranged them on a buffet or a high shelf.  High school graduations, service uniforms and weddings –once captured in a photo (black and white or color)– seemed to require permanent display.  Years after graduation, the picture was still there.  When the children resulting from the marriage were graduating from high school, the wedding picture of their parents was often still on display at Grandpa and Grandma’s house.
A couple of Dad’s 35mm slides developed from that amazing Kodachrome film were developed into 5 X 7s and displayed on our living room wall for years after the trip on which they were captured.  One was of Yosemite Falls, the other of Natural Bridge, Virginia.
Upstairs in our farmhouse were three bedrooms: two smaller ones with a walk in closet each, and a much larger one that had a large closet and a small one.  That larger bedroom was west-facing and, by the time I was understanding room-use, it was pretty much un-used because my three older brothers had left for the service, and that had been “their room.” The closet in that room became the catchall for old photos.
(Daisy trail here: some years later, when I was old enough to realize how naughty this was,  my Marine brother’s dress blues hung in the small closet of that room after he received his discharge. He had left a pack of Camels in the pocket.  Upon discovery of this incredible opportunity, my near-brother and I did the predictable deed.  The cigarettes were several years old at the time.  That experience may have played a role in my smoking [not] decisions through life.)
Back to the west room: there were two large cardboard boxes that sat on the floor in the larger closet and they were filled to the top with black and white photos taken as early as circa 1918, and also containing the snapshots taken last Christmas or this summer.  Once Dad got his slide camera, the old Brownie camera disappeared, and these boxes were no longer added to.  They began to be neglected, although no less valued.
There was nothing in these boxes except hundreds of small (no larger than 3″ x 4″ at the most) photos, many of them with a brief line written in pencil on the back identifying the people pictured.  There was no order in the storage… just ten or twelve pounds of small black and white pictures.
On a quiet spring afternoon when things had started to warm up so it was comfortable upstairs in the day time (since we didn’t heat the upstairs in winter for common sense reasons), I enjoyed   pulling out one of those boxes, and sit on the floor to go through it, looking at as many of the pictures as I had time for.
Pictures of Mom’s ten sisters in their late teens and early twenties, in their ironed dresses with big bows at the waist or in their hair.
Pictures of Grandfather seated firmly on an old wood kitchen chair, squinting into bright sunlight.
Pictures of a two year old seated on the ground, with seven complete rings of watermelon rind arranged across her lap, a moment of created humor, suggesting the child had eaten all that watermelon.
Pictures of a team of horses standing in an endless field, the plow dug into the dirt behind them, waiting to finish their morning duties so they can return to the barn to be replaced with the afternoon team.
Pictures of ladies wearing home made aprons lined up in front of a table loaded with food ready to be served at a threshing bee or farm sale.
And, only occasionally, pictures of some of those aunts seated in the prairie grass in spring, with a handful of wild flowers spread on their laps and the photo taken close up to prove that there were flowers, sometimes, in the spring in northeastern Montana.
The photos were always dusty.  Always there.  Always precious.
That’s the way of many memories, I think. Always dusty. Always there. Always precious.