Two photographs: a view into the past

 Good morning, family.  I was about to write this on my Rachel's House blog,, when it occurred to me that you might enjoy seeing it here.

Chapel Hill 7:00am, Saturday, 31 degrees

It's a rainy February morning, cold too, so I'm propped in bed reading and jotting my to-do list for today, every now and then glancing out the window at the birds who skitter between the feeder on my neighbor's high window and the brass tray outside in my low garden.

        

What catches my eye just now, though, is inside, on the wall slightly to right of my usual view...Elizabeth Matheson's photograph of a back porch behind the old Colonial Inn in Hillsborough.  She'd put it up on Instagram after she took it early one morning...probably about the same early hour I am looking at it now.  The minute I saw it, I wanted it for my own. 

 It reminds me, I wrote her, of my grandmother's and great-aunts' dresses.

Elizabeth, whose work I admire, was probably a bit puzzled by that, but she wouldn't be surprised.   Her art is wonderfully sensible about the spirits conjured up in quiet corners that reflect, for a quick moment, a certain inhabitable light.  I could have written a whole story about one in a book of her pieces taken in a nearly abandoned house some decades ago...an open bedroom window, the voile curtains blowing in toward what, on the other side of her camera, I imagined  could only have been a morning bed still rumpled with sleep. Anyway...

I love porches, and the swirled wrought iron chairs in this one, now happily mine to view from my rumpled bed, instantly bring to mind this photo of our aunts and my grandmother...Zia Rachele, Marietta, Zi' Erminia, Zia Clementina, Cousin Annie, the elders' dresses probably made by their own skilled hands....and who among them were more than a little past twenty at the time?  Aunt Rae and my grandmother look like they are still in their teens. (In fact, this one of Aunt Rae brings to mind photos of Aunt Sadie, when young...)

So what connects these two treasures for me?  It is the light, swirling around Elizabeth's Hillsborough porch scene, that recalls those dresses, laced and frilled, high-necked and bloused, some in white, some in black (those sisters were still wearing mourning after their father's death).  In the dark and light of her photo, the lace of shadows woven by the slant of early spring sun, and chair backs reclining out of a gilded age, I could see our own foremothers settling into this scene.  Imagine: all that conjured up by a moment shot on an early morning's walk by someone who didn't know where that moment would take me.

You may not see in Elizabeth's photo what I saw, but it doesn't matter.  One impression, firmly fitted into the memory even by a photograph taken in a time and place no where near one's own...like the one of our aunts and grandmothers...continues to enliven our inherited past in other impressions and sensations we find coming to us along the years.

It's why we save what we can of the past, I imagine...photographs especially...we bring them along to remind us of who we have, even before our birth, been made of, and, beyond who we are in today's mirror, of who we can be in the future.

Aren't we lucky to have come from such a rich historic re-past?

                                                                                                            --Vicky