In the spring of 1951, June packed one suitcase, a wool coat, and a Kodak Brownie camera. It was a plain black box with a viewfinder the size of a postage stamp. She was twenty years old, and for the next three months she would see more of the world than anyone in her family ever had.

June applied for the trip, which was sponsored by the YWCA. The focus was the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. She boarded a TWA flight to New York City. She had never flown before. She then embarked on a ship and sailed across the Atlantic along with other college students from across the United States. She also took photographs, carefully, because film was expensive and she had only so many rolls. Each picture came back in the mail as a small black and white square, scalloped at the edges, no bigger than a playing card.

She pasted them into an album with white ink captions. Paris on a Sunday. Lake Lucerne, the day it rained. Swiss glacier, slippery steps, sore feet. Over the years, June's photographs had been tucked away in various boxes and distributed among different family members: a few in one attic, a few in a closet, a few at the bottom of a drawer three states away.

June’s daughter-in-law collected them. She spent time gathering them, and as the small prints came together, they revealed a whole summer she had never heard about. There was June at the rail of a ferry with her scarf whipping sideways. There was June laughing on a cobblestone street with two girls whose names were written only as Marge and the Dutch one. There was a crooked photo of a cathedral that June had clearly been too excited to hold still for.

Colorizing a photograph, she learned, is less like painting and more like detective work. A black and white image holds only brightness, and many colors share the same shade of gray. A red coat and a green one can look identical.

June's scrapbook, which had turned up in one of the boxes, was the key. Around the pasted photographs she had added ticket stubs, a pressed flower, a folded travel brochure, and notes in her careful handwriting. The awnings along the boulevard were striped red and cream, read the page from Paris. My new scarf is the exact yellow of a lemon, and I love it more than I should. Beside a Swiss postcard she had written, The lake is a blue I didn't think was real. The brochure gave the colors of the tour bus, and a museum website confirmed the stone of a particular cathedral, warm honey in the sun and pale gold at dusk.