Photographic Memory

I was going through some old picture folders on my computer the other night and came across some photos I had taken whilst visiting my grandfather a few years ago. My parents, youngest sister and I had gone to visit him and attend the local show. I distinctly remember taking these in the fading afternoon light (using the sepia setting on my camera for some reason) and being quite happy with the images I took.


I particularly love the one of the old water tank, as a few weeks after we had visiting, it was destroyed by a spring-time hail storm and the one of the old outhouse door.

As a child, when we would visit my grandfather, my father would regale my sisters and I with stories involving this outhouse. Once they had installed an indoor toilet (apparently my grandfather got sick of having to get up in the middle of the night to take my grandmother and aunts to the toilet as they were too scared to go outside by themselves at night), my uncle and father turned the building into a science laboratory of sort - they would collect interesting specimens of this and that and store things that they didn't want their little sisters getting hold of. Once such specimen they stored in there was a preserved baby echidna. I can't remember the exact details of how they came across the echidna, but it mustn't have been preserved very well, because I remember my father telling me about the day the bottle exploded, spraying glass and the contents all over the outhouse and about how angry his mother was for "keeping that thing in there".


A visit to my grandfather's house was also never complete without opening all the cupboards in my fathers and uncles and aunts bedrooms. The contents never changed, but each visit brought new discoverys. Clothes (very vintage and at the time I was too young to appreciate this), books, photos, records. You name it, it was probably in those cupboards.