07 September 2009

A fascination with ...

... images like this one, which I found in Dec 08 while looking for photos of the big snow in Vancouver. (I've been tidying up the Drafts file on the blog...yet another aspect of "catching up with myself".)

It's obviously a photo, at dusk, of someone's little old house from the end of the path that goes through the backyard to the lane. They've gone down the path (see the footprints?) and taken a flash photo of the new snow (nearby flakes got lit up by the flash). Because of my summer homework's theme of "imagined interiors", I'm wondering why it's so fascinating ... I wrote when drafting the blog post, back in December, that I really feel drawn to this house, can imagine going in that back door - and back in time to a 1940s kitchen, perhaps. I try to imagine the layout of the house - two rooms in front, and two bedrooms upstairs. And a basement.

It reminds me of my house in Halifax, NS, which had a 1940s kitchen, built on to a late-1920s boxy basic house - in fact we found some xmas cards from 1948 in the little loft above that kitchen. One xmas eve, 1979?, when Barry from New Zealand was visiting, Roger decided to start remodelling the kitchen, so off to the lumber yard they went, got there before it closed - and by New Year the job was done, even the flowery-striped wallpapering above the white-painted wainscotting.

Rather than spend a day or so trying to find a photo of that congenial kitchen -- I used to cook and bake up a storm in those days! -- I'll leave you to imagine it. The large window came almost to the floor - the wooden table was in front of the window, and we rolled out cookies there, and decorated them. Outside was snow for many months (this was eastern Canada, after all), but for a while in early summer, swathes of day lillies bloomed. Lots of colourful leaves fallen from trees in the autumn. We had a ginger cat, a wild thing who let us adopt him. And at the front of the house was a sun porch, where you could sit on a sunny day in winter if you wore a sweater or two, it warmed up so well. Nice place, crazy times ... and then you move on.

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