One Picture
The Funny Thing About Photographs
Sometimes a photograph doesn't show you what you were trying to photograph. It shows you everything you forgot.
Sometimes a photograph doesn't have to be old to become a time machine.
This picture isn't old.
I took it in the winter of '25-26, which makes it about as current a photograph of House 173 as you can get. There isn't some great gulf of time between the day I stood there with the camera and today.
And yet I can already look at it differently.
That's the funny thing about photographs of a house you've lived in for nearly thirty years. You don't necessarily have to wait twenty years before they start telling stories. Sometimes you can look at a picture from a few months ago and immediately begin picking it apart.
Look at that apple tree.
That's the Macintosh we planted not long after we came to House 173. In this picture it dominates the yard, its bare branches spreading across much of the photograph and reaching up into all those utility wires that crisscross an old Albany neighborhood.
In summer, with all the leaves, you don't really see the structure of a tree.
In winter you do.
Every branch is exposed. Every odd turn. Every pruning decision. Every place where one limb decided it had a better idea about where it ought to grow.
And somewhere along the way, the little apple tree we planted became that.
I don't remember exactly when that happened.
We Waited 25 Years for That Bench
Look underneath the apple tree. There's the Leopold bench.
That's one of those little details in the photograph that probably wouldn't mean anything to somebody else. It's just a simple wooden bench beneath a tree.
Except we waited about 25 years for that bench.
Not literally for the bench, of course. A Leopold bench is about as simple a piece of outdoor furniture as you can make. A few boards, a few cuts, some screws, and you have yourself a place to sit.
We were waiting for the tree.
When we planted that Macintosh, there wasn't much to sit beneath. It was a young tree in a little city yard, and the idea of someday having enough shade beneath it for a bench required a considerable amount of imagination.
So we waited.
The tree grew.
We got older.
House 173 got older.
And eventually, after about a quarter century, the tree was finally big enough that we could make our Leopold bench and put it underneath.
I love that.
Twenty-five years is an awfully long time to wait for a shady place to sit.
But now it's there.
In this photograph the bench is covered with snow and there's nobody sitting on it. The apple tree doesn't have a single leaf.
But I know what that spot looks like in summer.
And I know how long it took to get there.
And There's House 173
Behind all of that is the house itself.
White and Flagstone Gray, with the black shutters. Those shutters are important. They were the impetus for the entire exterior redo.
Which seems ridiculous when you say it out loud.
A few black shutters.
But that's often how things happen at House 173. I don't wake up one morning and decide, You know what would be fun? Let's reconsider the entire exterior of the house.
Something small starts bothering me.
Then I look at the thing next to it.
Then the thing next to that.
And before long I've created enough work to occupy every available weekend for the foreseeable future.
Those black shutters did that.
Looking at this photograph now, I can see the version of the exterior that started the whole process—the white siding, the Flagstone Gray below, the white trim and those black shutters punctuating the windows.
There's the stoop, too.
The white one against House 173, partly hidden behind the apple tree. Nothing historic about it yet. Nothing lost. It's still there.
This is winter 2026.
But that's really the point.
Look Around the Edges
The longer I look at this photograph, the less interested I become in whatever I originally intended to photograph.
I start looking around the edges.
There's the neighboring house and its steps.
There's the "Beware of the Dog" sign in the window.
There's a recycling bin tucked alongside the house.
There's the shoveled path.
There are shrubs carrying little caps of snow.
There are footprints and shovel marks.
There are utility wires running everywhere.
If I were deliberately composing a pretty photograph of House 173, I'd probably try to keep half of those things out of it.
Now I'm glad they're there. Because that's what it actually looked like.
And I've learned from older photographs that the things accidentally captured around the edges eventually become some of the most interesting things in the picture.
One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time. - Annie Leibowitz
And Then There's Charlie
Down in the lower corner is Charlie.
Chest-deep in the snow, wearing his harness and staring intently up into the apple tree.
I don't know what he saw.
Knowing Charlie, there was probably a squirrel involved.
Or a bird.
Or perhaps absolutely nothing, which is often the case.
Dogs have a remarkable ability to discover urgent situations invisible to the rest of us.
Whatever it was, at that moment it was more important to Charlie than anything else happening at House 173.
And I love that he's there.
Twenty years from now, I suspect my eyes won't go first to the siding or the shutters or the stoop.
They'll go to that little dog standing in the snow.
That's something I've learned from nearly three decades of photographing this house.
I used to think I was documenting House 173.
I was really documenting our life in it.
The Photographs We Don't Know We're Taking
Most of the pictures I've taken around here over the years had a purpose.
Here's what it looked like before.
Here's what I tore apart.
Here's the horrifying thing I discovered underneath.
Here's what I did to fix it.
And here's what it looks like now.
Those photographs are useful. I'm glad I have them.
But increasingly, I find myself fascinated by everything I wasn't trying to photograph.
A planter beside the steps.
A shrub that isn't there anymore.
A window before I worked on it.
A paint color I'd forgotten.
A tool leaning against the house.
A dog wandering through the corner of the frame.
Or a little wooden bench beneath an apple tree that, without the story behind it, is just a little wooden bench.
That's where the real history seems to hide.
This photograph is from winter 2026, so almost everything in it is still familiar. I can walk outside tomorrow and see much of the same scene.
But it won't stay that way.
It never does.
House 173 will turn 100 next year. We've been here for almost thirty of those years, and I've finally been here long enough to understand that houses don't change in neat little before-and-after photographs.
They change by inches.
A railing here.
A shutter there.
A new color.
A repaired window.
A tree grows another foot.
Something gets removed.
Something gets planted.
And sometimes you plant a little apple tree, wait 25 years, build a bench beneath it, sit down and realize that somehow a quarter century passed while you were waiting for the shade.
That's why I'm going to keep taking photographs like this one.
Not just the finished projects.
Not just the pretty pictures.
The ordinary ones. Especially the ordinary ones.
Because someday I'll come across this photograph again and winter 2026 won't feel current at all.
I'll enlarge it and start wandering around inside.
Look at the apple tree.
There's the Leopold bench.
We waited 25 years for that.
There's the stoop.
Those black shutters started the whole exterior redo.
I'd forgotten about that.
And then I'll notice Charlie down there in the snow, staring into the branches.
And I'll remember.
Hey, thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
Keywords
House 173, apple tree, Macintosh apple tree, backyard apple tree, old house garden, urban backyard, small city yard, Leopold bench, handmade garden bench, backyard memories, garden memories, home and garden history, old house living, Albany NY home, One Photograph One Story