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Love - unlike mother and daughter dresses - never goes out of style.

I am 4 in the picture, my granddaughter Lucy’s age, sitting beside my mother, who is leaning against a boulder somewhere in the great outdoors. Scrub pines and scraggly trees surround us. A lake is in the distance, gray-white, the same color as the gray-white sky.

The photo is black and white, taken on an old Brownie camera, and lacks depth and texture and clarity. No matter how I stare, I cannot bring it to life. The grass looks like fuzz. My mother and I look like paper dolls cut out somewhere else and placed at this scene.

In a sense we were. We were city people, the outdoors foreign to us, open space something we read about, something we saw in books. Our trees grew in sidewalk cracks. Our flowers bloomed in florists’ windows.

Sometimes, though, on my father's day off, he would drive us to where the pavement ended and a sprawling world began. I was 3 when he got his first car. It had a running board and it used to stall on hills. He would get out and push it, my mother sliding behind the wheel. “Give it more gas, Dot. And easy on the clutch,” he would shout. My father loved that car. My mother loved all the places it took her.

I remember a trip to a lake on a warm spring day, planting a peach pit, my father telling me that a tree would grow from this seed. I remember skinny roads that wound through acres of woods. I remember picnics and carnivals and fairs and traveling all of one Sunday just to eat ice cream from a farm.

And I remember how on all those trips I would lean into the front seat — there were no seat belts then — and rest my chin on my hands so that I could listen to my mother and father talking and laughing.

Why do I remember all these things but nothing of the day that this one old, faded picture of my mother and me was taken?

I study the old photo, newly found. I study the dresses my mother and I are wearing. They are mother and daughter dresses, I say out loud, to no one, and I can hear the phrase in my mother's voice.

The dresses are short-sleeved and fitted at the waist. They have Peter Pan collars and full skirts. They are crisp and clean and carefully ironed. But I don’t remember what color they were or if the fabric felt soft or scratchy. I can't picture them hanging in a closet or on a clothes line or draped over the ironing board. But I know, looking at the pair of us dressed alike, exactly what those mother and daughter dresses meant to her and to me.

We had other matching dresses — one pale yellow and sleeveless, ribbed in navy around the collar with a belt that matched the ribbing. And one with a frilly, blousy top and a wide plaid bottom, which on me, because I wore crinolines, stuck out in permanent twirl.

How long did we dress alike? And when did we stop? Did I wake up one morning and say, "I’m too grown up to look like my mother"? Or did she wake up one day and think , "I’m too old to dress like a kid."

I hope not. I hope it was just a matter of dressing alike going out of style.

My daughter and her daughter, Lucy, have matching coats. But this wasn’t intentional. Lauren bought hers and I bought Lucy’s on the same day, white down jackets with fake fur trimming the hoods. “Imagine that!” we said, comparing purchases and laughing.

“Hey. You match,” people say, when they see the two of them. And to Lucy, “You look just like your mother.”

And Lucy and Lauren always smile.

I smile, too, witnessing this, because I remember how my mother and I smiled when someone said this to me.

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