Meet Ruth

Sometimes, very rarely, I come across a photo that stops me in my tracks. This photo did just that.

Last week I stopped into my favorite shop Treasure Island, in Sunnyvale, California, to look through old postcards. In one of his shoeboxes with cards there were some photo postcards mixed in there too. I found a few nice vintage colored postcards but then saw this one.

What a sweet photo!

Look at that smile, that dog, those shoes, that bow in her hair, those porch chairs. The list goes on and on.

The smile really got to me, though. It’s a kind smile. You can see that she’s a good kid. It’s also a mature smile. There’s no silliness there,  which is a little unusual for someone her age. It made me wonder what kind of life she had lived thus far to make her more mature.

Looking at her hair, to me she seems to be a mixed-race child. I wonder how it complicated things for her as she grew older. I will only imagine happy things, though. After all, her dog is smiling too, which is a sure sign of a happy home.

On the back of the photo is the single word: Ruth. No date, town, or anything else. It’s such a shame, because I would have moved heaven and earth to get this photo back to her descendants, like I did with this photo.

Anyway, I’m not sure what I will do with Ruth. I’ll have to think about it for a long time. It goes somewhere special. I do know that I *will* do something with it, however. It’s too precious to put back in a drawer and forget about.