Two Children with Icicle, Backyard Snow Day, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Two Children with Icicle, Backyard Snow Day, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Children with Icicle, Backyard Snow Day, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-C2E966

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The older boy has found an icicle the length of a forearm and is holding it up to bite it, which in the 1950s was considered a reasonable thing for a child to do outdoors in winter. He is dressed in a black zip-front leather jacket with a belt, the kind of jacket that in that decade signaled a boy was cool in the way that boys understood cool, which mostly meant Marlon Brando filtered through a Sears catalog. His younger companion, bundled in red with knit mittens, appears to be licking snow off her glove, so the icicle has competition.

Behind them a snow-covered backyard stretches back to what looks like a shed or outbuilding, the kind of American suburban or semi-rural property that in the postwar decade accumulated a modest disorder of parked equipment and volunteer shrubs. Neither child appears to have been told that eating ice off the ground is inadvisable, or if they were, the advice did not take.

This is what a winter afternoon looked like before organized indoor entertainment became the default setting for children. The whole scene ran on unsupervised time, cold air, and the discovery that ice is edible, which children have been independently rediscovering every winter for as long as there has been winter.

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