Family pictures. They may keep you forever young, but they may make you glad to be where you are now. Either way, they record change.

We had a photo taken in December during the 1950s. We rode along in a fake sleigh, through a tunnel with walls painted of winter scenes, propelled on a pair of tracks of the type found in amusement parks.

Our sleigh was inching toward our goal. Santa Claus! I sat in the front seat, wearing a bonnet with a brim that turned up to form a brown wool halo. The older of my two brothers was dressed in a brown plaid jacket that proclaimed Michigan! Lumber jacks! In the back, my father wore a jacket of the same style but made with thick cotton, with a knitted collar. A quilted lining kept him warm. My mother was dressed in a gray herringbone, woolen coat. What the baby wore is lost to history.

We looked like a family that lived in the north, barely above the 42nd parallel, barely in the middle class. Our family continued to grow. As the family birthed a total of four children, the number of pictures snapped lessened. School pictures took the place of family photos, with the exception of vacation photos.

My second-grade photo shows me holding a crayon and looking up from under my overly permed hair. Apparently, hair as straight as mine did not pass muster. Looking at that photo, a friend, who is Black, told me the best part of going away to college was that her mother could no longer straighten her hair. We laughed over how fashion nullified who we were … and still are.

One fashion, tights, became popular when we were in the sixth grade. Before that, we wore ankle socks with our uniforms. Hardly comfortable at the 42nd parallel in winter!

I made a case against perms at 12. Curlers ended in two years when I became the first girl at my school to embrace the Mary Travers/Joan Baez look. Another time when fashion made sense.

Before my daughter attended school, she wore tiny dresses under pinafores, an adorable look that is no longer seen. I was so inspired by dressing a baby girl that I learned to sew. But for her first outing with me, to an antique show, she wore the yellow dress with a white pinafore that my mother bought for her. I carried her while she slept in a front pack. Her shoulders and arms were not imprisoned in the pack and her tiny legs, clad in white lace tights, dangled below.

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An older woman walked up to me. “What is your boy’s name?” “She’s a girl.” “She should be wearing pink.” “Do you see the ruffle on her pinafore and her lace tights?” I asked. “But you should always dress a girl in pink.” I walked away.

Decades later, when my daughter was in second grade, she was photographed wearing a pink sweater with a little charm necklace and hair held in place with a ribbon.

My granddaughters wear pants to school. If they do put on dresses, they’re worn with tights or leggings in fall and winter. When it is really cold, they might add knitted leg warmers that were once only worn by dancers. In summer, they wear bicycle shorts under dresses. They have the freedom to walk up the slide or to hang by their bent legs or just to dance.

While never a fashion adherent, I wore skirts to work with a blazer more often than I wore pants. Strangely, I must consider dresses more formal than pants, which leaves me puzzled. Dresses are cooler in the summer. Worn with a sweater and cotton tights, dresses are warmer than pants and a sweater. Unless, of course, they’re wool, or, corduroy worn over knee socks.

However, today’s fashion is casual. When prom season came upon us last spring, I wondered what kids wore. A T-shirt advertising a favorite band? But even I have a Richard Thompson tee. Who knows? I might even find a Jordi Savall shirt!

Susan Wozniak has been a caseworker, a college professor and journalist. She is a mother and grandmother.