Leif & Peter Anthony on a Swing - Tokyo, Japan - May 8, 1983

I wish I knew which park this was in Tokyo. We only went to this one once, and it was on May 8, 1983, when our time in Japan was dwindling. We moved to Hawaii about two months later.

It was a fun trip and the boys enjoyed all the playground equipment, especially this unusual swing, which they had going very high.

I was still taking both black and white and color photos in those days, and I think this is the same park where I took photos of Peter Anthony sitting beside a monkey, the two of them imitating each other.

Peter W. and I were talking today about the best times of our lives. They were the years when we had our children together and they were young, the years we spent in Charlottesville, Virginia, Germany, Japan and Hawaii, from the summer of 1976 to the summer of 1986. Those were a charmed ten years, a wonderful decade with our boys. We got to experience so much of the world, experience their growing and becoming. We were together, and their problems were small and solvable then. Ours were, too. We were young and vital and happy.

Oh, yes, we had our moments of frustration and anger, our days of irritation and unhappiness, but they passed quickly and were washed away by all the good days and happy times. We were so lucky to have them.

We are so lucky still, to have those memories and the photos to take us back to those days.

In these photos, Peter A. was 14 and Leif was 8 years old, and they were happy, too.