Strafford, Vermont, 1994-1997
Revisited 2020
Thanks to a long and twisted process of fate and crip circumstances, I left the west coast in the summer of 2019 and returned to my hometown to live with my parents and teach at the small rural K-8 school I attended as a child. I returned to Vermont eight months before the COVID-19 pandemic began. It was like the great migration of the 20-somethings. As the economy crashed, the world burned, and people fled from city to country, millions of Americans found themselves returning to their childhood homes. By the summer of 2020 more than half of Americans ages 18-29 were living with their parents. I was simply a few months ahead of the curve.
Moving back in with my parents wasn't just an economic decision. It was a disability necessity. I moved back to Vermont in order to deal with my health but it also meant confronting ghosts from my past. And that's where Homestead came from. digging through old photographs in a blue dresser drawer, working and living in a town that I thought I had left for good. Finding myself only a few minutes from a place where I had once lived a lifetime ago.
The cabin you see in these photographs is a patchwork quilt, spare bits and pieces added to an abandoned party line phone house. It was a small two-room shack with a wrought iron light above the door. After being lifted from its foundation and moved twice, it sat on land that belonged to some friends. So although my father and his friends had rebuilt the cabin we had no claim to owning it. When I was three, they sold their house and farm and with it our home. That was in 1998. We were evicted and the cabin was abandoned. My father and his friends stripped the house when we left. Our things went into people's barns and yards. Our community coming together to hold our stories. They took the boards from the walls and ceilings they had built they had built, removed the porch and its aluminum roof, and hauled out the clawfoot bathtub. Nobody has lived there since. I returned to this house, this shell, to photograph what remains: a bundle of herbs still hanging from the ceiling, my old rocking horse jammed into the rafters. The daffodils in my mother's garden were blooming.
