The other day I surveyed the photographs, postcards and paintings that clutter my office. Each has its own story. One of them in particular connects me to a distant time, when Columbus was a very different place.

I’ll call the photograph, “Sarah and ‘Son.’”

The subjects of the photograph are my deceased father and Sarah Lusk, who, to my siblings and I, was “Aunt Sarah.”

My father was not a friend to the camera. When faced with a photo-op, he assumed an expressionless mask. This photograph I took of him and Sarah sometime in the late 80s or early 90s is a rare exception.

He may have been facing the onset of Alzheimer’s, which may have eliminated that particular inhibition.

Or it may have been Sarah, who had known him since he was 14, and, who for as long as either of them could remember, had called him “Son.”

She was a living link to his childhood and his long-deceased parents.

Two weeks before Sarah’s wedding to Ewell Lusk in 1928, the bridegroom to-be came to Columbus — he and Sarah had lived in Oxford all their lives — and knocked on the door of Grandma Eunice, my father’s mother.

Ewell explained he was about to be married and understood she had rooms to rent.

In those days folks with extra space often took in boarders. The house at 809 College, across the street from the Catholic Church, was more than adequate for my grandparents and their only child, my father.

My grandma said, yes, she would rent the newlyweds a room. Ewell thanked her and, without looking at what would be his home for decades to come, returned to Oxford.

After their wedding, friends gave them a ride to Okolona where they spent their first night as husband and wife with Sarah’s sister.

The following day they caught the GM&O Railroad to Columbus, where, upon arrival, they took a cab to my grandma’s.

They were not the lone tenants on the second floor of the College Street house. Five young women, who had come to town for jobs at what was then called “The Garment Plant,” later Seminole Manufacturing, shared two bedrooms, and a local character named Lonnie Powell another.

Sarah and Ewell would live with my grandma their entire married life. My siblings and I called them Aunt Sarah and Uncle Ewell.

They ran Lusk Cleaners, located on Market Street across the street from the entrance to the convention center.

Sarah was at his side when my grandfather, despite Dr. McClanahan’s best efforts, took his last breath on a hot June day in 1948. She would survive Ewell and my grandma.

On another June day in 1985, I drove Sarah to Meridian to visit her niece. During the drive, with Beth and three active young children in the back seat, I taped Sarah talking about hers and my family’s history rooted in that house on College Street.

That audio recording is a family treasure. I encourage readers to get their family memories on tape, or via the technology du jour. There is something about the power of audio to evoke a person’s memory that transcends video and photographs alone.

For a time Sarah and I were housemates in the College Street house. My grandma had died and Sarah, a widower, continued to live in the room she and Ewell had shared.

She expressed to Son her concerns about sharing a house with a raucous young man in his early 20s. My father was unyielding.

Turns out her fears were unfounded. We got along famously, often going together to Milton’s Mr. Pig on Main Street for a sausage and biscuit breakfast. And she loved my friends, most of them raucous young men themselves.

About the photograph, I don’t remember much. We were on the front porch of the house just off Military Road my parents lived in for a time.

I have the print in a 8×10 wooden frame that once held a studio photograph of me taken on my first birthday. The photographer was Roy Gring. For reasons I’ll never know, it was Sarah and Helen Gault, another longtime boarder of my grandma’s — Aunt Helen to my siblings and me — who took me to Mr. Gring’s for the sitting.

Both, no doubt, would have shaken their heads in disbelief given the news the toddler in their care.

Gring’s studio was on College Street where the Methodist Church sits. It was next door to a bicycle repair shop roughly across the street from Brookshire’s Dairy Bar. Continuing toward town, one would have passed the Liberty Cash Grocery store where vending machines dispensed five-cent sodas, the Coca-Cola bottling company where you could watch from the street Cokes being filled on a moving conveyor and Woolworth’s Five and Dime with its dazzling candy counter.

Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.