Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

They were memorable trips, full of moonshine by night, the heat of each day leavened by dish towels dipped in icewater. (We didn’t get air-conditioned cars until years after the rest of the US was driving them.)

Amity and I both loved Little House on the Prairie. It seemed, then, like a normal decision to protect both girls from the sunlight with enormous poke bonnets. It seemed normal to outfit the backseat with two little slates, two pieces of chalk, and the full six-volume set of McGuffey’s Readers, to see if my ten-year-old might teach my three-year-old how to read. (She did.)

Many years later, Amity was a young lady learning about photography. One of the first pictures she took, and one that I cherish, shows the back seat of our old car, harshly sunlit, from the point of view of the little girl that she once was.