A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell | The New Yorker

Deanna Dikeman’s parents sold her childhood home, in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1990, when they were in their early seventies. They moved to a bright-red ranch house in the same town, which they filled with all their old furniture. Dikeman, a photographer then in her thirties, spent many visits documenting the idyll of their retirement. Her father, once a traffic manager at a grain-processing corporation, tended to tomato plants in the backyard. Her mother fried chicken and baked rhubarb pie, storing fresh vegetables in the freezer to last them through the cold. Every Memorial Day, they stuffed the trunk of their blue Buick with flowers and drove to the local cemetery to decorate graves.