A few days ago I decided that I really had to catalog all of our books.  If you know my hubby and me, then you know that we have a LOT of books.  Right now, after working haphazardly for two days, I have 350 books logged.  And that’s just the books in the living room.

As I was putting books into the catalog, I came across a book that hasn’t ‘seen the light of day’ since we moved here almost three years ago.  As I was looking for it’s ISBN, a picture fell out.  I took a quick glance at it and thought it was me when I was thirteen or fourteen.  Then I realized that the child that ‘I’ was holding I didn’t know.  It wasn’t one of my brothers.  It wasn’t any child that I remember seeing before.  As I stared at the image I realized that the child was my uncle… who is 10 years older than I am.

That’s when it dawns on me – that’s my MOM in the picture.  It’s eerie how much we look alike.  I’m assuming that it’s a trend that is going to continue as I get older, which is very OK in my book.  *grin*

Now, the odd part is that I have never seen this picture before.  It’s clearly an older snapshot, my Uncle looked to be about 3 years old in it and right now I’m in my late 30′s; making him in his late 40′s.   My mom is probably 14 in the photo and it’s a generic enough background that I can’t place where it is.  So, how did a photo I’ve never seen end up in a book that hasn’t been touched at least three years?  Granted, I’m notorious for grabbing odd items to use as bookmarks and then I leave them in book.  I never use photographs as bookmarks because I’m obsessive about old family photos.

When my grandmother was very ill and later after she had passed away, the photographs she had went mainly to my mom and my aunt.  I went through the baskets of photos as I could and sneaked out a few that either had doubles or I thought wouldn’t be missed.  My mom did pull out all of the ones that she found that had me in them and gave them to me, but she didn’t give me any were her or the boys without me.

In my fancifulness, I like to think that the Gods snuck that picture to me because I’ve never really thought that I look like my mom.  Everyone has always said that I look like her but I honestly believed that is something that people always say… the whole ‘oh, you look just like (insert appropriate parent)’.  Then I found one of my mom’s senior pictures and I was shocked that we really did look alike.  However, I didn’t have an opportunity to get a copy of those and have regretted it.  Now this shows up.

This is the second time that I’ve had odd happenings pop up in regards to pictures.  I can’t remember if I wrote about that before or not, so I’ll go check and if I didn’t I’ll make another post with that story.  If  I did, I’ll come back and link to it.