My mother as child

The girl is my mother when she was in elementary school. The dog and boy were neighbors. I scanned this photo recently, though I've had it on the mantle in a pewter frame for years. Photoshop is miraculous! I can see the detail, now.
Looking at a photograph is like looking through a tunnel to the past, with the path traveled since etched on the walls. I see her as a bright-faced child and yet also see the pains and pleasures on the path she took since then. I know my mother's life wasn't a happy one, with a pedophile for a father, and job descrimination as a Jew in WWII era Cleveland. She quit school before high school to work, and then quit a dry-cleaning job where she was referred to as "The Jew girl". She afterwards wrote "Protestant" where it asked for religion on job applications.
When she was fifteen, my mother moved to "The Projects", as both my parents called it, and met my father, who was not Jewish, but a handsome boy whose first language was Greek, not English. She refers to this time in her life with pleasure. The Projects, depression-era housing for the poor, were where Jews and Greeks and other immigrants lived together, and the teenagers dated each other happily. A veritable paradise, compared to their prior neighborhoods. My Jewish grandmother cared for my father's little sister while my Greek grandfather worked, and my aunt learned English from her, an ironic contrast to the present sociological pattern of childcare.
My mother and father began dating, and while she worked at several different jobs that the war allowed women, he enlisted in the Navy to do sonar work on a sub, and was instead sent unceremoniously to Yale! (see family photograph on this blog) After the war my parents eloped at age 20. It was, at the time, a "mixed marriage", and the parents were not in favor of it. But they stayed married for 28 years, and the child that you see in the photograph became the mother of three. My mother had never overcome her depression and anxiety which were brought on by her family genetics and enviroment (her father's family had several hospitalizations, and he was abused by foster parents when he was a child), until recently. She sufferred a severe depression and was hospitalized. Consequently her doctor suggested ECT (Electro-convulsive Therapy) which she eagerly embraced as a way out. And it was. She is another person to us, now. Even when she calls with bad news, she remembers to ask about our lives, and is genuinely interested. She is happy. Perhaps not like the child in the photograph, who had yet to suffer the indignities and injuries of life, but as an old woman who has known both happiness and grief.