Albums, My Mother, and Me

Yesterday was a rare situation in our household where my son's nursery school was closed and my mother was also off work. Thinking this was a golden opportunity, I picked up a part-time shift and asked my mother to look after my son just for the morning.
When I returned home after my shift, my son was clingy at first, but within a few minutes, he wanted to play an app game he had installed on my smartphone. So, his target wasn't me, it was the phone!

When I looked at the living room table to thank my mother again, I saw a pile of unfamiliar things. They were albums. And they looked quite old, too. The covers had a heavy, historic feel, and the pages inside had yellowed with age.
"I can't go to the grave in Ishikawa this year, so... I just wanted to feel like I was there."
With that, my mother slowly turned the pages.
She explained that these albums were things she had retrieved from the nursing home when my grandmother passed away last year. My grandmother had three daughters: the eldest, the second eldest, and my mother, the third. Since the eldest and second eldest had already passed away, the albums had made their way from Ishikawa Prefecture to Nara Prefecture, ending up with my mother. There were over ten of them.
As I peered at what my mother was looking at, she turned the album around to show me. Without even being asked, I sat down in the chair opposite her.
Inside were many small black-and-white photos. Because they were small, you could fit many on a single page. The photo size we use in our daily lives now is called L-size, but these small ones are Leica-size. It seems they were the same size as the negatives back then... I wonder if people today even know what a negative is.
There was a scruffy-looking child in the photo. It was my aunts when they were young. A child with a bob cut and red cheeks (well, they looked red, though it was actually black and white). It was a scene straight out of a Showa-era picture book. It felt like something from a history textbook.
"Do you know this person? And this one... oh, that's so-and-so. Oh, this person used to take care of me often..."
The history of my mother's side of the family, which I knew nothing about, was told bit by bit. How the main family only had daughters, so my great-grandfather, the second son of a branch family, was adopted into the main family to keep it (my mother's birthplace) going. How my grandmother was one of four siblings, one of whom went to war and returned safely. How my grandfather's military boots didn't fit, so he was sent back home early.

The era in the albums moved forward, and my aunts were now adults. Suddenly, there was an aunt dressed in a kimono with heavy makeup, and my uncle, who had also passed away young.
"This is so-and-so's wedding. It feels strange that I'm the one holding onto this."
My mother referred to her two older sisters by their nicknames. I had never really seen the three of them interacting as sisters, but looking at the photos, they must have been close.
When she pointed and said, "This is me," I saw a girl in a kimono who looked strangely familiar. I stared at my young mother, thinking, "Oh, she looks just like me at my Shichi-Go-San ceremony." I had never really thought I looked like my mother, but the slightly rustic look and the way she was pouting her lips were exactly like me when I was little. When I told my mother this, she just said, "Really?" It seems there is a difference between the appearance of my younger self that I remember and the appearance of me that my mother remembers.

The "Meeting to Remember Grandmother in Ishikawa" had completely transformed into a "Meeting to Look at Albums and Reminisce." Eventually, even our own old family albums appeared. We followed the timeline through my parents' wedding, the birth of my eldest brother, and the birth of my older sister. By then, they were all color photos.
However, photos of parents' honeymoons are not meant to be seen. The two of them looked so young and happy that I couldn't help but have the strange thought that these two were actually a man and a woman, too.
Before long, my son, tired of his smartphone game, started begging for snacks, and the "Meeting to Look at Albums and Reminisce" came to an end. Or rather, I was the only one who left. My mother seemed to continue the reminiscing session by herself, going up to the birth of my second brother and my own birth.

August 15th. Today is the anniversary of the end of the war.
Looking at the photo of my grandfather in his military uniform, I felt so incredibly grateful that he had made it back safely. This year marks 80 years since the end of the war. My mother is 70. If my grandfather's military boots had fit perfectly, and if he hadn't come back, my mother wouldn't have been born, and naturally, neither would I. I just felt, truly, how glad I am that he was safe.
During the Obon season, visiting the grave is of course important, but I think it's also good to spend time thinking about our ancestors like this. In modern times, we can save photos as data, so we probably make fewer physical albums. But considering that they might be read ten or twenty years from now, perhaps leaving things in the form of an album is an important thing to do.
Well, today, I'll go to the grave with my son.