Back from a road trip

My mother took this picture from her kitchen window in, I think, late summer 1972. I have some vague memory of the event. I had spent a lot of my time the previous two years on the road, hitchhiking to places in Canada and the the northern USA, hoping everywhere for work but mostly living day-to-day and by the grace of the people I met.

I had come home the previous day, with all my gear wet from rain and, this morning, I asked my kid brother to help set up my little pup tent in the backyard to dry it out. That was so I could store it in my room for the winter. I was starting university again and expected not to be on the road much until the following spring.

My mother held her camera up to the kitchen window and took this picture. Her camera was the same one she'd used for thirty years, a Kodak Brownie that took 6x9cm pictures on 620 film. She continued to use that camera for another twenty-five years, until I gave her a 35mm camera to replace it. (She missed the old Brownie but by then 620 film was very difficult to get.)

The film she used this day was a C22-process film and, I expect, already when she finished the roll she couldn't get it developed. It sat around until 1999 when, while cleaning out her house after my father's death, we found it and another just like it.

Of course in 1999, I couldn't find anyone to develop C22 film. (A few years later and I would have known about, say, the Seattle company that does it as a special order.)

But I did know I could develop it as black and white. And that I did a few months later.

Developed, the negatives looked really bad, dark, with many blank frames. The negatives, in turn, sat around for twenty years -- until a week ago when I scanned them, and digitally tried to bring up the images as much as I could.

Thus this one. The wandering son's return home, settling in for another year of university.