One Photograph, One Story
Things We Didn't Know We Were Photographing
We thought we were taking a picture of a new car. Twenty-seven years later, it was everything behind it that I wanted to see.
Someone from our German family took this photograph in the spring of 1999.
I have no idea why.
That would make some sense. The red Volkswagen Jetta was brand new, a City Edition, and the first brand-new car we'd ever owned. There wasn't much fancy about it. No air conditioning. Manual windows. It didn't even have a radio.
But it was a great car.
Solid. Handled beautifully. We kept it for about twelve years.
Maybe whoever had the camera thought the new Jetta was worth a photograph.
I doubt it was me... that had never happened before.
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| Summer 1999. A new car, a fairly new homeowner, and an old carport nobody thought was important. |
Twenty-Seven Years Later
I found the photograph again tonight.
I hadn't seen it in years.
And this time I didn't see one thing.
I saw everything.
I saw myself at 34, still built like I could probably play rugby.
I saw our first brand-new car.
But then I started looking past both of them.
I saw the chain-link fence.
I saw the tall grass and clover.
I saw a yard that hadn't become ours yet.
We had bought House 173 in August 1997. This was only the second summer afterward, and both yards were still pretty rough. Most of what would eventually happen on our little one-tenth of an acre hadn't happened yet.
No carefully considered little corners. No decades of moving plants around and finding places for things. No accumulated evidence of us.
It was mostly just the yard we'd bought with the house.
And above the new car and the younger version of me was something considerably older than either of us.
Mr. Mosher's carport.
The Thing That Stayed
Mr. Mosher apparently built the carport sometime in the late 1950s or 1960s.
It wasn't fancy... angle iron posts. A corrugated roof. Open sides.
But that thing was built.
When we eventually replaced the chain-link fence, I boxed in the original angle-iron posts. Later I replaced the roof with plywood decking and corrugated metal.
But I never tore down the structure itself.
There was a practical reason for that.
If I removed the original carport and started over, the replacement would have had to meet the newer property-line requirements. It couldn't necessarily go back exactly where Mr. Mosher had put it decades earlier.
And, naturally, the code enforcement guy lived over on the next block.
So the old carport stayed.
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| The carport today. Somewhere underneath all those later improvements is the same angle iron Mr. Mosher put there more than half a century ago. |
That's the part of this photograph I can't stop looking at.
Because the carport in the picture isn't gone... it's still there.
The posts I see in this photograph are inside the posts I see today. Mr. Mosher's work is still holding up mine!
What We Thought Was Important
There's something funny about old photographs.
When we take them, we usually know what the subject is.
A person.
A new car.
A birthday.
A Christmas tree.
A dog.
Whatever made somebody reach for the camera.
Then enough years go by, and the photograph changes.
The person is still there. The car is still there.
But your eyes wander.
You notice the lamp on the table.
The wallpaper.
The old kitchen cabinets.
The tree that was still small.
The fence you forgot about.
The thing sitting on the porch that nobody in the family can quite identify anymore.
The background becomes the photograph.
That's what happened to this one.
Nobody stood in the backyard in the summer of 1999 and said, We really ought to document the existing conditions of this carport and the surrounding property for George to study twenty-seven years from now.
Someone just took a picture.
Thank goodness they did.
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| Not replaced. Built around. The original structure is still inside. |
Everything in the Picture
The Jetta lasted about twelve years.
The yard changed almost beyond recognition.
The grass and clover gave way, little by little, to all the things we've planted, built, moved, rebuilt, killed, replanted and occasionally wondered why we'd put there in the first place.
The 34-year-old standing beside the car changed a little, too.
The carport?
Still there.
And that's why I don't think this is really a photograph of me or the Volkswagen or even the carport.
It's a photograph of a beginning.
We'd been at House 173 less than two years. We had no idea what the place would eventually look like. We didn't know which things we'd change, which we'd uncover, which we'd restore, and which things left by the people before us we'd simply build around.
We certainly didn't know that twenty-seven years later I'd find this photograph and stare at the background.
In 1999, House 173 was still mostly the house we'd bought.
I didn't know it yet, but we were already beginning to make it the house we'd remember.
Hey, thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
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Anonymous Reviewer
J.T., Columbia, TN
“The Background” starts out looking as though it's gonna be a pleasant story about finding an old photo, but it quietly becomes something more interesting. The red car and the younger homeowner initially command your attention, exactly as they probably did when the photograph was taken. Then the writer redirects your eye toward the unkempt yard, chain-link fence and unremarkable old carport behind them.
The revelation that the original angle-iron carport still exists inside the renovated structure gives the story its weight. Nothing dramatic happened to it. It simply remained while nearly everything around it changed.
The strongest passage is the observation that old photographs eventually change their subjects. Anyone who has studied an old family snapshot looking for the wallpaper, furniture or long-gone tree will recognize the experience.
Most importantly, the post doesn't manufacture nostalgia. The photograph wasn't taken to preserve history. History simply accumulated inside it.