Joanna Volavka

This week’s Throwback takes us to 1988 (or possibly early 1989) when I was in Kindergarten and my sister was still half my height. She’s a bit taller now.

Anyway, I chose this photo for a similar reason to the living room photo. It’s just a candid of us doing something (I’m not even really sure what, but my guess is that I’m snapping beans and E is trying to brush my hair. Always the fashionista, E’s been.) and it captures a moment in time really well.

Those shoes I’m wearing, for instance, are my VERY FAVORITE shoes I’ve ever owned. They are Chucks, or the Keds knock-off version, and I probably owned half a dozen pairs because they were the only ones I liked so my poor mother had to buy them in ALL THE SIZES. I just kept trading them for a bigger pair as I grew, which was a LOT back then. I was a tall kid.

The floor was linoleum, and I remember the blue squares being a lot more blue than they look in the photo. I used to try and stand in the small rectangular bits until my feet got too big. The heart-shaped rug wound up in my bedroom for a while, or a similar one did, along with some heart-shaped pillows. This was during the PINK phase of my life. Sometimes I still waffle back and forth in that phase. Dabbling in PINK if you will.

Yeah, I know I’m not wearing PINK in this photo, but that’s because I discovered teal (hence the shoes) and it rocked my world. I’m an 80s kid, what can I say?

Ohhh those ponytail holders. I had to have a HIGH ponytail and it had to be perfectly smooth or I’d have an absolute meltdown. If it got even the SLIGHTEST bit pulled, it had to come down or be fixed IMMEDIATELY. This was the year I acquired bangs, too. I kept them until 6th grade.

I remember that dishwasher, and how the lever locked it during wash cycles. The stove was directly opposite it. I feel like that microwave was very new and cutting edge at the time, too… and it’s funny how it doesn’t look much different than microwaves do now. I guess some things just can’t be much improved. Well, or they improve so slowly we don’t notice along the way. Incidentally, the green blobby thing on top of the microwave was a clay triceratops I made and painted. They were my favorite dinosaurs.

Even though it’s hard to see, there’s a purple violet on the window sill with a ceramic angel holding a number “1” in her hand. The angel was from my first birthday, and I’m kind of glad I didn’t wind up with an entire collection of them. Where would I put them now??

Oooh, you get a bonus! While digging for photos, I found this one, too, from around the same time. This was not long after my sixth birthday in 1988 and I’m with my two best kindergarten friends at the time (notice the qualifiers?), Katie and Shelley. We were in a class “play” as the Three Little Kittens. Sometimes I wonder what happened to them… but mostly just when I see these photos. It’s interesting to me how much I remember from kindergarten, and that I can look at class photos and remember names. It makes you realize how important it is when you tell kids things, because they absorb SO MUCH. Anyway, Katie and I (around this time) had a play date and we got into my mom’s eyeliner (which was in all sorts of fun colors… again, 80s) and did FACE PAINT. Eventually the eyeliner became face paint more than eyeliner anyway, but I recall playing with makeup and making an absolute mess.

So there you go. Kindergarten me. ^_^

Read Full Post »

This photo is from June, 1984. Thanks, handy Sharpie marking at the top!

While I don’t have any specific memories from this particular photo, I would like to point out my mom’s adorable blue bathing suit (which looks like some current styles I’ve seen, actually) and my dad’s short-shorts as proof that this is absolutely in the 80s. I’m about 20 months old in this photo, and (finally) growing in my hair (remember the weird face photo and how I had none? yeah, that lasted a while…) and my dad is holding the same blue bucket that appears in the photo from the following year (taken in the dining room).

(I like parentheses today, apparently. Hope that’s okay.)

This photo is from the Florida Gulf coast, near my grandparents’ house. I know that from the sugar-white sand and green ocean water that you can generally only find on tropical islands but because of GEOLOGY also happens along the Gulf. It’s much prettier than the Atlantic is in a way, though nothing quite beats the Atlantic for a gray, stormy day with plenty of lightening. But I’m getting off track.

I remember that there weren’t usually shells of any sort on those beaches, because of the ocean floor dropping off about a mile off shore. I remember that it was hard to make sand castles because the sand was so powdery, but it was soft and nice to play in nonetheless. I remember my dad pulling me out on a raft to the sand bars where he’d find sand dollars and put them on the raft with me to crawl around and I’d watch their tiny feet wiggling and was terrified of getting in the water myself for some inexplicable reason (I’ve never been afraid of sharks so… water maybe?) and we’d ride the waves.

I remember clumps of seaweed washing up after high tide, or storms, and shaking them to get the little animals inside to fall out onto the sand and then scooping them into the blue bucket (filled with water, of course) and I’d have my own little aquarium until it was time to dump them back in the water and go home. I found fish and hermit crabs and tiny shrimp and even seahorses! When I was a kid, I thought they were baby seahorses because they were so small, but I learned recently that they were a species of dwarf seahorse, the smallest kind in the world. How about that?

I remember playing in the sea oats (when I wasn’t supposed to probably, though my grandmother was never big on rules if there was fun to be had) and running along the hot pavement between the house and the water.

And I really wish that beaches around here were as pristine (and empty) as that one in the photo looks. Gorgeous.

Read Full Post »