New Days / Old House

With no prior New England experience, my husband and I fell in love with a peeling red 250-year-old house on an overgrown lot south of Boston. We had come north to be nearer family; we had no plan to become curators and caretakers of a piece of history.

As the house came back to life, we learned of the former inhabitants and some the life and history before us. We are the fourth family to have lived here as the Sever family, who built it, kept the house in their family for 200 years. I started photographing our life in the grand old house with the raking sun over the hand-hewn woodwork and the patina of prior lives. Life is transient but the house is durable. We are strangely aware of the movement of the sun and the resulting daily patterns and warmth have been cheerfully keeping company with generations of inhabitants.

We have brought in our computers, bar codes and detritus of life in 2011 but the routines of our life, cooking, sleeping and being are probably very similar to every other family living here.

My photographs join glass slides of the house and photographs from the 1930s at the local library. Only the camera can freeze the moment, the era and the life for the future.