Workshop Write

Prompt: The man in the photograph is tall and thin with weathered skin. He's dressed in a suit and looks ill at ease. Who is he? Why, where and when was the picture taken?

Albert ran his finger back and forth over the glass in the picture frame, as if the simple motion might make his old man's hair lie flat. Even back when this thing was taken, that cowlick in the front insisted on sticking straight up in the air. It screamed that the suit was out of place. It was.

His father had been more at home out in the fields, among the plants, under the blue of the sky. There the wind played with his hair and it wasn't expected to behave.

The only thing he loved more than the land was his family.

They were here, too. His mother, Genevieve, his brothers, Carl, Dennis, Richard, and Joseph, his sisters Mary, Elizabeth, and Rose. It was amazing really that the picture ever got taken in the middle of the corn harvest, but it was his old man who relished these keepsakes, these snapshots in time that froze memories forever in black and white. The circumstances explained his mother's frown. It was no small feat to get eight children clean and in their Sunday best just because the photographer had chosen that particular day to make his rounds through the plains of Kansas. Then everything had to be taken off and hung up before it was dirtied. That happened so fast with young children and there was just no time between today and Mass to do laundry.

If only Mother had lightened up just a little, then instead of looking so stiff and stern there would have been that old familiar light in Dad's eyes, and his elbows would have stuck out in that same loose way they did when he saw his great-grandchildren rushing toward him. He was so thin, more like a weathered pole than a man if it hadn't been for that bit of pride that radiated stronger than his discomfort. One arm was draped around a boy--Albert himself--and Albert could still feel the warmth from him that radiated through two threadbare coats, that filled him with a contentment and pride that he would miss sorely now....

Albert was brought back to the present by a screech, giggles, lighthearted and quick footsteps over the hardwood floors. His grandkids were up to something. Had to be. Albert was grateful that their glee continued on no matter what the occasion. They had been so good through the funeral. They had a right to play now. In fact, maybe it was time to gather them all together for a picture. His father would have done it long before now.