These are a little bit old, from Christmas, but there’s no time like the present.
We did a Christmas event at my great-grandparents’ home. They’re both gone now, but there are still family events and kids and life and presents and running water and things. This is right above the steps on their side porch, where everyone entered, into the kitchen:
I always wondered what kind of wood they used there. It has aged well, considering how long the house and that porch have stood there. I like to thing that worn away spot is a sign of many happy visits to see good people.
Years ago I got my first real camera for Christmas and I shot some of the first rolls of film here. As we left after this particular Christmas event I made sure to notice with much happiness, and relief, that the old dinner bell was still in the yard. That was one of those first pictures. When I was being “artistic” or something. And now, here I am, taking pictures of nails on my phone.
My grandfather pulled out some old pictures he’d found while working his way through his parents things. This is the first one he pulled out. It isn’t exactly crisp. I didn’t have a scanner in my pocket and had to make do with a picture of a picture. He said it was all gone now. He didn’t know who the man was and the only thing that might be left, anywhere, was the plow over to the left margin.
Even still, I couldn’t help but look at every barn from here to there and wonder:
I asked him if he’d thought about taking these photographs to church. It is a community that has stuck together quite nicely over the decades. Maybe someone there would recognize an old family face. He didn’t seem too optimistic:
When you look at the entire series of photographs he’d found, in the nice crisp shots under better light, you could tell that a lot of the same faces kept popping up. So these are people somewhere in his family. In this picture two or three of those faces have similar features to some people he knows:
This is that same family. The original shot is fairly blurry, too. But they’d gotten out, put aside their chores and put on a nice jacket and went and stood outside the homestead for this shot. Now no one knows who these people are anymore, which is somehow both sad and a happy mystery.
Probably they are in Alabama here. Most of my families, I’ve found, settled here before it was a state, which of course pre-dates photography of this kind. If not in Alabama, these ghosts are more-than-likely standing in Tennessee.
Even still, there are family events and kids and life and presents and running water and things. It takes more than nails to hold a place together, to allow for the time to wear down that solid wood.
