In a Vacant House: Wilding with Jen

Ever see two dogs running loose, getting into trouble? It really takes two. Tongues lolling, tails high, they go looking for adventure. A dog on its own just isn't as inquisitive or fearless. When it comes to going through old houses, I'm definitely a dog. I'm not a fearful person; not given to the heebie-jeebies. I just want to have someone with me. Maybe it's to share the fun and amazement. Maybe it's for that little boost through the open window. Maybe it is a little spooky to go through a vacant house alone. It's a little spooky to go through this one with someone else!

I had a feeling my dear friend Jen would be up for some adventure. I wanted to show her one of my favorite houses. I hadn't been inside it since James came to see me, several years ago. I remember what fun it had been to finally see the inside of a house I'd wondered about for years! I knew there'd be neat stuff in there. She was admiring the house and had noted the open window. "I don't suppose you'd want to climb in there with me, would you?" I asked. "Hell yeah!" Jen answered, and we were off and wilding. 

Carpet was Jen's innovation, after I ripped my good lined trousers on a nail. That is a very small window to fit through. That's another reason to have a friend along--to help you pull your leg up and through!  

 

 First thing we saw was a mouse nest, which had once been sandwiched in between wallpaper and wall. Oops.  There was some funky wallpaper going down in this house.

 

Like I said, it was a little spooky from the inside. I've photographed this ancient Hydrangea arborescens from the outside so many times. Now here it is, in winter plumage, from the dark musty inside.

As it was in summer 2016, when Chet was with me. Sweet memories of giving him a cold drink from the well each time we came there. I loved running there with him. I've really only just gotten used to going there without him.

2014. Hydrangea and window behind. He's already so gray. 

Onward. We're in an old house, not hunkered down in the sweet July grass outside it.

I'm diggin' the little framed placard, and the fact that someone long ago rubbed the dirty glass to see what it said. I finished the job with a licked finger.

For YOU, MOTHER.

May the sun smile through your window

From out the skies of blue

Upon the world's sweetest creation

"Mothers just like you."

I think card verse has gotten better with time. I liked thinking, though, that in this house had lived a mother someone thought so well of.

 

Shaving stuff--a straight razor, Palmolive Lather Soap. Tums, $.30. And Spirits of Turpentine. People put stuff like that on their skin. Not me, not ever!

 

I looked at the massive old fridge with its supercool funky logo and said, "I bet if you could plug this thing in it would still run. Probably drive you out of the room with noise, but it'd work." Which is more than I can say of the three refrigerators that have died on me in the last 24 years. When I was a kid, you had the same fridge/freezer your entire life. No more. Planned obsolescence and crappy materials are the name of the game now. This thing is built like a dang battleship. You could go over Niagara in this refrigerator. I mean, if you wanted to. 

In the corner of the kitchen is a secret.

It's a cabinet that stays almost closed. The bottom shelf is a tumble of cutlery (I can't really call it silverware). There's a jar of washers. Oh, so many washers. My dad saved washers. Sadly, I am of the cohort that barely knows what washers are for, and rarely ever deploys them.

 

 On the second shelf are some little dishes and cups.

 

On the third shelf are some more washers and cotter pins. So many cotter pins. Again...not something most people these days collect for later use. 

  

The green milk glass coffee mug? Straight out of my grandmother Ruigh's cabinets. That was her dishware. I'm sad that by the time I came along, the last of five, my grandmother Elnora Zickefoose had only a few more years left in her little brick bungalow in Sheffield, Iowa. I never got to go through her cabinets; ate only a few meals at her table. But oh, what a cook she was. As was my maternal grandmother Frieda Ruigh. I never expect to eat so well again. Looking back, I realize what a gift those meals were, and I'm grateful that my parents took us every summer to see our family in Iowa.

I looked hard at the cotter pin can.  Recent enough to have a barcode and be called LeCafe! Somebody tell me what year barcodes happened...On June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m., Sharon Buchanan used a barcode to ring up a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. Thank you, Google! So this house was occupied at least through the late 1970's, I'd say, and nosing through the Christmas letters, into the 80's. Situational awareness, my friends. More than 30 years gone from here, the inhabitants, and all this beautiful wreckage, telling of their time here.

 

On the top shelf is the best thing of all. An electric juicer (Jen thought it might be a coffee press at first and I laughed; this is definitely 8 O'Clock Coffee, ground in a can, country).  But that's not the best thing.

 

 A Carolina wren nest! It's been occupied for several years that I know of, hidden in that magic cabinet, which I mostly closed back up when I was done snooping. The parents enter the house, I'd think, through a variety of holes, and as far as I can tell they lead the babies out via the window we climbed in. That's on the other side of the house, but a trip like that is no big deal for Carolina wrens. They're brainy--spatial perception kings.  They teach their children well.

Cabinet, ready for occupancy, spring 2018.

Now for the tableaux I love so well.

That massive refrigerator, and some boots and a barrel and bucket and stool...oh my gosh. Andrew Wyeth, bar the door.

I'm always trying to get people to click on the photos in my blog to see them large and in focus. Not going to tell you what this letter says. Trust me, it's worth reading. The things you pick out of a pile of Christmas cards from the mid 1980's! And while you're at it, run through and appreciate the other photos at full size, please and thank you.

Tools on the far kitchen wall. I have always wondered if the tools hung here when the original inhabitants lived here, or whether those went up after the house became a sort of storage unit. So I gave it some thought. I'm leaning toward the latter explanation. I mean, I love the way they look but I doubt Grandma would have allowed this in her kitchen. This looks like an after-they-left arrangement to me.

We'll just hang these here where we can git 'em. Nobody hangs a saw on the very edge of a corner they're going to walk around (the basement door). Ergo: Put up after everyone moved out.

Eek. This is what I mean by spooky.

Another look through that kitchen door before we go up the creaky freaky stairs.

The light-gathering capability of my iPhone6, my partner in all crime and adventure, is such that the darkness of this stairwell is not adequately conveyed. I went first, you know, in case BATS. Note the wall to the right.

Those are ancient logs, barely covered with plaster and wallpaper. James muses,

"That log frame is something I think about often.

What were the forests where those seedlings began?

Did they know native Americans?"

 

 LOOK at those logs!! In this humble house, forest giants, felled. When??

 

 

Pretty posies, peeling, uncovering the venerable bones of a house that's not going to fall down anytime soon.

An ironing board. Wonder and trepidation in discovery. Gratitude to be able just to look at it all.

An electric clock, strongly reminiscent of the one in my Gram Ruigh's kitchen. Again, I had the strong feeling this one would work if plugged in. "I bet it buzzes like a ...." I said to Jen. I was haunted by the thought that it was 11:10 AM when it was taken off the wall and thrown into a box, to be found over 30 years later by a harmless trespasser. Telechron brand. Sounds so Buck Rogers, doesn't it?

Creepy toys and school papers. Who will ever know?

 

Hangers, breeding in dark corners. 

Big tropical leaves were in vogue in the 1940's. I wondered why there was no color to these. Understated.

 

In a corner window sash, a hand-tatted tie for curtains, long gone. Everywhere, hand-made things that are no longer hand-done. I thought at first it was a snakeskin. Jen figured out it was a curtain tie.

 

Hunters come here. This one, I think, died on its own; the skull mostly gone as it would be had something chewed it in nature.

It was time to get back out into the sunshine. There's been so little of it this spring!

 

 

May the sun smile through your window

From out the skies of blue.

We climbed back out the pronky small window, our wilding done for the day.

The golden forsythia, the blue sky, and my favorite tableau of all were calling.

 

I saw the ghost of Chet Baker stomping across this couch, sniffing for decades-old crackers in the cushions.

The couch is losing color. Chet no longer stomps. A squirrel has taken a large divot of stuffing for its nest. The couch melts away. 

Time can only keep spooling out.

 

The log cabin stands yet.

Jemima on PBS Nature! Tonight!

Jemima's last visit was Christmas Eve 2017. But she has achieved immortality!

Way back at the end of June, a magical thing happened. Mark Carroll, a natural history cinematographer absolutely dripping in awards (his latest, an Emmy for his work with filmmaker Ann Prum of Coneflower Studios on PBS Nature's "Super Hummingbirds,"), arrived at Indigo Hill.

Through the magic of social media and college connections, Ann, wife of my birding buddy and fellow Harvard classmate Rick Prum (himself a MacArthur fellow for his work studying bird plumage, his book the Evolution of Beauty, and mating systems), had become aware of Jemima. It occurred to her that Jemima might be the perfect semi-wild bird to play the Avian Predator in Coneflower's butterfly special, in production for Nature.

Jem had been free since the 11th of June. Could I keep her around, train her to come in for caterpillars; get her to cooperate for the shooting? From those questions hung a big story and a LOT of stressing on my part. I laugh every time I think of it.

 

Working with Jemima and Mark to get video of her, in the wild, bashing and eating caterpillars, is a rollicking story in itself. For obvious reasons, I won't tell it here, but it's one of my favorite chapters in Saving Jemima, the book I'm working on for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Due out October 2019. I keep saying that so I will meet my deadline of Oct. 1, 2018. Yikes that's coming up fast.

It was such an honor to be able to make this sequence happen for Mark Carroll and Coneflower and Nature. As I'll relate in the book, it was allll up to Jemima whether or not to cooperate. You probably can't imagine what that was really like. Arrrrgh.

Jemima tickles Mark Carroll as he sets up a shot on a hot June day in our yard. Photo by Bill Thompson III

The result of Mark's work and my worry will air TONIGHT, Wednesday, April 4, at 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central, on PBS's Nature. I will probably be bawling my head off in awe and wonder as my tatty blue daughter does her worst to hapless caterpillars right on the TV screen in the living room where she played. I plan to put my iPhone on a tripod aimed at the TV so I can watch it over and over (I lack the ability to record otherwise). I hope you'll be watching!

Heere's Phoebe!

It seemed only fair, given my successful senior pictures photoshoot with the Thin White Duke, to give my Eternal Flame a chance at digital immortality. The trick was finding a sunny afternoon during her winter break--more difficult than it should have been, but that's this winter for you. Cold and wet and snowy and anything but comfortable. On the morning of March 22, I watched thick clouds ever so slowly break up, and gave Phoebe, who was busy with homework, a heads up that we could get lucky in the afternoon. A broken sky gave way to blue, and we mobilized, jumping in the car and speeding to my favorite place for afternoon light, rolling hills and decrepit buildings. We brought an array of outerwear but no hairbrush--she says her hair looks better when she doesn't brush it. Must be genetic; my only hairbrush is my fingers.

 

I'd been looking forward to this ever since shooting Liam. I love photography, but more than that I love helping someone appreciate and truly feel their own beauty. "These won't be good. I don't look good today," Phoebe warned. Oh. I hadn't noticed that she didn't look good today. And I'm pretty observant. "Let me show you not looking good," I answered, cackling. "You've got youth, estrogen and an ectomorphic body type on your side, hon. If what I'm seeing through the lens is 'not looking good,' I'd love to not look that good."

I've said it before: shooting people is a lot like shooting wild creatures. The longer your lens, the better you're going to do. Nobody likes to have a camera stuck right in their face! The other great thing about a telephoto lens is that it automatically has a relatively shallow depth of field, so you get this beautiful blurred-out background, focusing on the subject. Oh, how the sky picks up her blue eyes. Red hair and blue eyes is the rarest combination.

 

All through high school, I tried to get my daughter to wear denim, without success. As I think on it, denim was what everyone else she knew was wearing, so she steered clear. I forced one of my 18 denim shirts on her when she left for college. "Trust me on this. Denim goes with everything, and it looks fabulous on everybody. But it'll look even better on you. " Imagine my delight when she turned up for the shoot in that same shirt. It works with weathered barnwood, blue eyes and red hair, that's for certain.

 

A stray shaft of sunlight tricked out her hair in the shot above. We went inside the barn to see what we could do there. Oh my! Shadows from a leafing honeysuckle vine fell on her face. Her hair was on fire. The light gave a lushness to her features I hadn't seen before--the slight cleft of her chin! Rembrandt light.

  

I love these Phantom of the Opera shots. There was so much more we could have done, but the Golden Hour was fast fading away.  

  

 

 Let's try a shot through the mullions. Uh-oh!

 

It's the Creeper! We had to have the Creeper shot. I think Phoebe's scarier than Liam! Things like this, I think, have to happen so you can get images like these next ones. 

We moved out to catch the last of the sun's rays. The siding was a beautiful black, and there was just enough sun to light her cheeks. She was totally relaxed and we were getting some really good stuff.

Never oblivious to what's going on around her, she watched and listened to the birds all around. A crow landed briefly in a nearby pine and just as quickly reversed course when it realized there were humans below. "Is that a crow?" she asked, suddenly alert, laser-focused and crouching. It was such a Zick moment I felt I was seeing myself as a 21-year-old.

Such rich textures, between the barnwood and the brambles and that glorious hair. I don't know how one person gets so lucky on the colorful genetic Wheel of Fortune. Both my kids have been lucky.

 Back to posing. "Mess with your hair. Put it up."

Ahhh. Good.

 

I decided to try the black doorway once again, the one that had bamboozled me with Liam.  Two professional photographer friends had suggested exposing on the barnwood as a neutral gray, instead of on Phoebe's face. It worked! I got velvet black and true skin tones. Now I want to take Liam back and try again.

I love the peace in her face here.

 

 Chasing the last red rays of sun, we found them slamming against some red leaves. We'd been practicing the sudden turn that whips her hair into a wildfire.

 

 

 

 Time for jumpshots! We were happy we got such beautiful photos, and I was happy that Somebody wasn't thinking she "didn't look good today" any more. 

Launch it, Red Rocket!

 

 

 

 

 

Some say youth is wasted on the young. Not these young.

With such a graceful and willing subject, it was hard to turn the camera over to Phoebe, but I wanted a photo of myself with the Toothless Lady before she falls down.

I kind of melt right into that old barn. But my teeth are better.

 

We were heavy into shooting when a red pickup came barreling up the never-traveled road. I knew who it was, and was surprised at the speed at which she was driving. She skidded to a halt as I hurried to get my car out of the way. A relieved smile spread across her face. At a distance, she'd taken my camera for a gun and was hell-bent on chasing me out of there. We both laughed.

"Now I know who you are and what you're doing. Thought that was a gun!"

"Well, that's our adrenaline rush for the day!" I answered, and with that, what little light was left fled.

 

 

Thus ended our most excellent Senior in College Photo Shoot. Both kids now, thoroughly documented.  And a couple old ladies, too.

There's something about the juxtaposition of this slender flame, balancing on the brink of her whole life, and that deliquescing barn, waiting for the derecho that will bring her down, that brings a lump to my throat. Time never stops. People keep moving. Buildings left untended fall down. All we can do is love them while they're here.