jin: I relate to your words fr. many perspectives. thanks.
When I was very young we spent summers in the Adirondacks, a half hour or so further north from where this photo was taken. It was there in a sweet little bungalow colony I learned to row a boat, to cast a fishing line, to square dance. It is a beautiful place, where wealthy old New York families – Rockefellers and the like – have their “great camps” – opulent “rustic” pine lodges built beside one or another of the region’s gorgeous lakes. Never far away, though, are those who live in houses like this one, and worse. One day, lost and looking for a place to turn back, my mother turned down the only road possible, a lane where the houses were like this one: dilapidated, but inhabited. Further on down the lane was a trailer home, also inhabited, but listing and with one side badly bashed in from a car accident. The dwellings got worse and worse the further along we went; at the end of the lane was a shack built simply of wooden fruit crates covered in tar paper. When we reached the shack, five or six kids our age – brothers and sisters – came outside and lined up in front of the house to look at us, skinny, blond, unsmiling, and dressed in burlap sacks. In this forgotten patch of Appalachia, we were an unwelcome oddity as we drove through in our shiny blue Chevrolet station wagon, my parents’ first new car. I was five years old and I still remember the shock of seeing those children my age and older – twelve? fourteen? – dressed in burlap. We kids stared back, humbled, stunned at coming face to face with such deep poverty and only a few miles from where we’d come to enjoy the simple pleasures of a week in the country.
mm.
this house needs to be cared for!! poor thing!
those are inordinately long windows on the bottom. they must have a view when you pry the shutters open.
m. really want to gently close that banged back screen door.
jin: I relate to your words fr. many perspectives. thanks.
When I was very young we spent summers in the Adirondacks, a half hour or so further north from where this photo was taken. It was there in a sweet little bungalow colony I learned to row a boat, to cast a fishing line, to square dance. It is a beautiful place, where wealthy old New York families – Rockefellers and the like – have their “great camps” – opulent “rustic” pine lodges built beside one or another of the region’s gorgeous lakes. Never far away, though, are those who live in houses like this one, and worse. One day, lost and looking for a place to turn back, my mother turned down the only road possible, a lane where the houses were like this one: dilapidated, but inhabited. Further on down the lane was a trailer home, also inhabited, but listing and with one side badly bashed in from a car accident. The dwellings got worse and worse the further along we went; at the end of the lane was a shack built simply of wooden fruit crates covered in tar paper. When we reached the shack, five or six kids our age – brothers and sisters – came outside and lined up in front of the house to look at us, skinny, blond, unsmiling, and dressed in burlap sacks. In this forgotten patch of Appalachia, we were an unwelcome oddity as we drove through in our shiny blue Chevrolet station wagon, my parents’ first new car. I was five years old and I still remember the shock of seeing those children my age and older – twelve? fourteen? – dressed in burlap. We kids stared back, humbled, stunned at coming face to face with such deep poverty and only a few miles from where we’d come to enjoy the simple pleasures of a week in the country.
mm.
this house needs to be cared for!! poor thing!
those are inordinately long windows on the bottom. they must have a view when you pry the shutters open.
m. really want to gently close that banged back screen door.