Mee Maw and the Fig Tree

Here is a photo of my paternal grandmother Germaine Erie Patureau.  I’ve always known her as Mee Maw.  I saw the first version of the photo in 2019.  It was in the Tin Can Collection that originally belonged to my Aunt Wana.  It has since been taken over by her children Tricia and perhaps Tim.  Both of them have shared photos from the Collection, but it’s usually Tricia.  She’s the one who showed me the image in 2019 when a few of the cousins got together.  Wow.  It’s almost five years now.  I took a photo of the photo because I liked it.

It wasn’t until tonight that I realized that I had two versions of this photo.  I discovered this improved version in 2021, when I looked closer at some of the things that I took from my parents’ home when we moved them to Assisted Living.  As I looked through the old photos and such, I found an old packet of negatives.  Some of them were really old.  Those were from the 1930s when my dad was a kid.  Then there were others like this one that look like they came from the 1950s.

So I scanned those old negatives, and this was one of them.  I didn’t recognize it from two years earlier, but I did like it.  I like discovering new photos of my grandmother who hasn’t been around for over fifty years.  I had to guess the approximate year the photo was taken.  I compared it to known photos of her through the years and decided it looked like some time in the early 1950s.  Does that sound about right?  She was born in 1895, so that would put her in her mid to late fifties.  Hmmm.  Maybe it was taken earlier.

And I’m not even sure where the photo was taken.  I had thought about calling it “Mee Maw In the Back Yard,” but I wasn’t sure I was correct about that assessment.  I don’t remember the house that she lived in back then.  I recognize the back of the house because there are several photos of the family taken there.  But this area does look like a back yard with fig trees and other plantings.  I can tell that it was probably winter, based on the bare branches of the fig tree.  The bare arms of my grandmother say that it wasn’t a particularly cold winter day.  If I knew the color of her dress, I would have used that in the title of this post.  But I’m not familiar with the dress and don’t remember seeing it.

I don’t know much about the photo, it would seem.  Yet I am still drawn to it.  I like her determined pose and the way she’s standing firm.  Most of the photos of her from this time period are group photos.  She’s either with her husband and her eight children, or she’s with a gaggle of grandkids.  There were new ones appearing every year.  So to have a nice, sharp photo of her all by herself is a gift. 

I share it with you.