Related by Marriage: "You look just like yourself in that photo!"

Whenever someone says that to me, I am miffed. I don't think that I look *anything* like the girl that appears in my childhood snapshots. I know I'm wrong, of course, because I still turn to the same reliable bag of facial tricks that I used back then.

This formal portrait of Mr. Irene's maternal Aunt, Martha, illustrates how facial expressions emerge early in life. Martha was three years old when she posed for this photo. Martha died earlier this year. For all the years that I knew her, this is the expression that I best remember.

Bridgeport, Chicago, 1921. Martha stood for this portrait on the same day that she posed with her maternal Aunt, Petra.