The Winged Heart

Erik suggested that I go ahead and photograph whatever I wanted today, as a bonus day, since I photographed a bug for him yesterday.  A nice sentiment, but look what my dad found while he was grilling outside:

Is this some kind of joke, Erik?  “You should photograph whatever you want.  You’ve earned it.  Oh by the way, here’s a gigantic stag beetle.”  Just because you have bug-summoning powers doesn’t mean you need to flaunt it all the time.  Jeeze.

Seriously though, I think my parents live in a jungle.  And also, photography/more general bug knowledge has made me much braver than I used to be!  I got up pretty close (but not too close) to photograph this guy.  Here’s one with Nick for size comparison:

But I did take some photos that I wanted to take today.  My parents are getting their old house, the house I grew up in, ready to sell.  They built a new one out in the rainforest country back in 2009, and our old house has been sitting unoccupied since then.   It’s been taking a long time to get 20+ years worth of 4 people’s stuff cleaned and cleared out.  It’s weird going back there now.  We transitioned out of the house gradually as the new one was being built, and now suddenly I haven’t “lived” there for almost two years.  It doesn’t smell like home anymore, and older features of the house that didn’t seem particularly bad when we were living there are becoming more noticeably dilapidated.  I always imagined that I’d be really upset and nostalgic when we sold our house, but watching it gradually become not really our home in this way has been a good form of closure, I think.

I tried to photograph all the little details of the house that I had a memory of.  It’s a pretty old house and has a lot of character, especially after having the same owners for over 20 years.

The original hardwood floors in our dining room.  Covered with carpet when we lived there, I think they look pretty cool.

Our house has lots of old doorknobs.  They even have keyholes.  I wonder what life was like in our house back when anyone still had the keys.

The windows use a rope/pulley/weights system to open.  Most of the windows in the house were basically painted shut, even the ropes had been painted over.  Despite all the paint, my window still opened throughout my childhood and teenage years, and I liked to keep it open when the weather was nice.

The window in my parents’ closet has some cool colored, faceted glass.  You can see it from the front porch.  It looks out of place since nowhere else in the house has glass like that.  I wonder if it was installed when the house was first built or later on.

The other side of that window, from the outside.  It’s amazing how cleanly paint will peel off.

More peeling paint, on the bricks that make up the outside of the basement walls.  It’s funny, the green theme has carried over into the new house, but now we’ve updated from mint and hunter green to spring green.  Hooray!

Door to the garage.  I always liked the way it smelled in there.  Now it’s like a time capsule, with my old car, toys from my childhood, and doors that used to be in the house.

We never did play much basketball!

I went and faced one of my fears: the well under the deck.  Why do we have a well under our deck?  I don’t know.  I feel like I’m young enough that I remember my dad building the deck, but I don’t remember anything about the well before then.  I guess that means my parents were good parents and kept me far away from this dangerous death chasm.  It doesn’t have that above-ground stone circle part, just a cement square with a round piece that sits over the top, not even covering the entire hole.  My cats used to run under and hide underneath the circle part on a ledge.  Sometimes I would go in after them and plead them to come out.  The well scared me as a kid, and scared me even worse after I saw The Ring (I was 16 and still had to get my mom to confirm that there was nothing “down there” to be afraid of).  It gave me one more scare today as I crawled over all the rotten leaves and saw that it’s basically collapsing in on itself.  I wanted to get closer and try to get some light down there to get an inside picture, but stepping near the edge gave me visions of the whole thing sinking under my weight and me falling down into the water filled with who knows how many dead animals and the huge stones falling on top of me and trapping me and me dying before anybody managed to find me.  So I just took this one and scurried back out.

Seriously.  Why not fill this thing in before building the deck all those years ago?  Maybe it’s still hiding some secrets…

Those are the majority of the pictures that turned out nice and seemed interesting enough to post.  The lighting was pretty dim in the house, so most of my documentation is pretty blurry.  I’ve always thought my house was cool because of the interesting architectural elements that came with its age, but today I was mostly interested in photographing the things that looked old, falling apart, peeling away, showing the toll time has taken.

So there you have it, Bonus Day 31!  We’ll be on the road tomorrow, so hopefully I can find 15 minutes to start my 30 day drawing challenge.