A couple of weeks ago, I found an old family picture that I forgot that I had:

It’s a small picture, about 2” x 2 1/2.” In this photo is my mother, my father and me. I don’t know how old I was, but I’m pretty sure I was five years old or younger. The reason I can pinpoint it to this time period is that my brother is five years younger than I am, and he’s not in this picture so it was probably taken before he was born. Also not pictured is my sister, who is the youngest of us and obviously could not be in the picture.

Our father, sadly, passed on a few years ago. For this reason, it was an even nicer surprise to find this picture. Little did I know that, before long, I was in for an even bigger surprise.

Yesterday, my mother showed me this:

It’s a bigger, 8” x 10” black and white version of it. Is that a surprise? Not really. The surprise is where this picture was found: in a thrift store.

Somehow, someway, our family picture found its way into a second-hand store in our home town and it just so happened that my sister saw it there. The store owner, obviously not knowing who we are, was trying to sell the frame with the picture in it. Apparently they were going to take the picture out and sell the frame but luckily my sister saw it before this happened. She asked if she could have it, since it’s her family in the picture, so it was given to her.

The question now becomes: how in the world did one of our family pictures end up in a thrift store? Especially one of our earliest pictures with 2/5 of our family not even born yet? It’s a mystery, I can’t imagine how that happened.

An even bigger mystery is that they were found so close in time. I found the color photo on March 29, 2013 and the framed picture was shown to me on April 11, 2013. That’s 14 days apart.

Regardless of the strange circumstances, I’m glad we found both copies of this picture and can preserve that part of our family’s history.