Old Photographs

Jilda's mom and dad wasn't sure about me. I was from the "other side of the highway" and I'm not sure they trusted someone with long sideburns.
Somehow she talked her parents into letting her ride with her friends Dale and Debbi, to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The only catch was we had to be back home by bedtime.
That was long before sleep-overs were permitted without a marriage license. 
It was the Friday after Thanksgiving 1969, and Gatlinburg was a 5 hour drive so we headed north at daybreak. It was cool in Alabama, so we took warm clothes.
On the trip up we all listened to music, talked about our hopes and dreams and offered solutions to most of the world's problems.
Dale was driving a 1968 Ford Maverick and it was cozy in the back seat. 
The air got thinner as we climbed higher into the Smokie Mountains. We saw so many deer and wild turkey that we stopped counting. We saw a black bear and pulled over to the side of the road to watch him at a distance.
Just after noon, we noticed tiny particles of ice ticking on the windshield. Soon a light snow began to fall.
We pulled over at a wide place in the road for a photo op, and to eat a picnic sandwich.  Dale, who later taught me about photography, shot this picture of Jilda and me. It's one of the first, if not the first picture that was ever taken of us. 
That was on November 28, 1969.  In this photograph we both looked as if we could see into the future. I'm not sure we saw all the twists and turns that we'd go through, but I think we saw that most of the journey would be smooth sailing.
As I said before, I love looking through old photographs.