The caption on the back: "Summer of 1957 Helen at ocean, pb & jelly sandwich had been turned upside down on Helen's hair."

For Christmas, Fred and Nancy gave me copies of photos taken during a camping trip my mom took with her friend Carolyn LaRoza in 1957, when my mother was 10. Carolyn brought them to Fred and told him the story of how my mom had gone on the trip with her family to the ocean. She said that in the tent my mom and she got into a fight with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and my mom ended up with a sandwich in her hair.

Few pictures exist of her at this age. Everyone, including myself, is struck by how much she resembles me when I was 10 or a little younger. Most of the time, any resemblence is hard to detect. My cousin Katie tends to look more like her than I do.

Mom was feisty. I loved learning about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich fight because it reminds me that my family is wacky and that somewhere in my genetic landscape is a dab of vitriol. This story is just one of a few that I've heard. I like the ones my uncle Fred tells the best because, as the only child younger than my mom, and the sibling to which she was closest, he admired and adored her. When he tells a story, he laughs from the belly with profound fondness. For instance, the time his friend Alan doused her with a bucket of water as she walked to the house from the barn after tending to the livestock (I think this is how it goes -- mythologies are born out of memory loss). My mom got her own bucket of water and saturated the inside of his brand new convertible. Fred laughs about how he'd warned Alan beforehand that his sister would get even.

Fred recently told me another story about the time my mom and one of her friends taught him how to throw tomatoes at cars. She had told him that they had to be careful not to be seen so they would stay hidden in the bushes. He said they were hidden in the bushes waiting and then a car came along. Suddenly, to Fred's complete surprise, my mom and her friend blithely ran out to the road and in plain site started hucking tomatoes.