Welcome to Old Photos Week! Every day I will post a photo or two from the batch of film I had scanned recently. Since I sent it in blind, some of the images that came back were surprising. Some I had forgotten. Some I never even knew existed.

My mom's mother (my grandmother) did not like cats. Not even a little bit. I heard her mention it several times over the years. I don't know why, really... I always thought that maybe she didn't like all pets, but apparently she was okay with dogs. So no clue. Unless she was tired of running into their covered poop when weeding the vegetable garden perhaps? One of the many, many things I wished I had asked her about while she was alive.

And yet...

There are quite a few photos of cats hanging around in old photos of my mom when she was little. My first guess was that they were wild cats that lived in the area, but then I see photos of my mom holding them. That doesn't seem likely if they were truly wild, so I'm not quite sure what the story is there. Maybe they were pets, but they had to live outside. I'm guessing my grandparents had a barn, so maybe they were barn cats who kept the mice in check?

One of my favorite pictures is this one of toddler mom with a furry friend. I am assuming that this was taken at her home, because the series has no other people except mom, grandma, grandpa, and mom's brother...

This photo brings up another mystery... what's with the playing card in the dirt there?

Because my grandmother didn't like cats and would undoubtedly have shooed them away if she was trying to take a photo, I'm guessing this one was taken by my grandfather. Looks like a cat walked in-frame and plopped down to lick its butt while grandpa was taking a picture of mom and her brother...

My mom seems to like cats (she was a huge fan of Spanky), so I guess hating cats is not genetic.

When my final scans arrive, I'll probably print my favorite photos of toddler mom with cats to add to the collage in my stairway. It's nice to have two of my favorite things in a single photo.