Jack and Frannie ~ Sepia Saturday

My husband's parents in 1945.  So handsome, so pretty -- and I love the way he's looking at her.  They'd been married about four years . . . and they would have almost forty years together before his death.

Jack was in the Coast Guard and a part of the occupying forces in Japan. He told a story of a man trying to give him a baby girl because he couldn't afford to feed all his children.

Of course, being in the military, there was no way Jack could take the child and he always wondered if she had survived.

The curly-haired child is my husband John -- Johnny back then.

And this is Johnny, about three, being given his new sister  Genie to hold. The look of pure joy on his face is such a delight!

 I expect the lady in white is a 'practical nurse' -- the sort who used to stay with new mothers, sometimes for weeks, back in the days when these new mothers were treated like invalids and kept in bed for weeks.

There would be two more children four years later -- Fay and Peter, the twins.  

And Genie would die at twelve, the result of a horseback riding accident and nothing would ever be the same for Frannie.

That makes these early pictures especially poignant to me.

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