Many of you know I grew up on a farm in rural south-central Pennsylvania. When I was but two years old, my parents left the nice suburban home they had built near Harrisburg and moved to what my mother often characterized as her "Green Acres" move. (Kids, click the link, or just ask your parents. It was a sitcom on television, produced in the late 1960s until 1971, featuring a city couple who move from NYC to a farm in Hooterville [yes, way] into a run-down farmhouse.)
My parents bought a farm that featured a pre-Civil war Georgian-style brick house of a type common in the region. The front door (which we rarely used; who really uses their front door?) had a central hallway with two rooms to the left and two to the right. As part of the necessary, massive renovations, they changed the floorplan to combine the two rooms to the right into one large living room, ripping out a kitchen in the process.
The central staircase led upstairs to four big bedrooms and one bathroom in the center of the hallway. My parents spent lots of time and energy redecorating the bedrooms, adding a closet to mine and, in my sister's room, blocking off the back stairwell in order to add an enclosed closet.
My sister and I each had our own big bedrooms, and in that way I was luckier than my older boys are now, for they share one of our three bedrooms. My room was on the road side of the house in a corner, so I had two windows facing the road and one facing in the direction of our barn.
At one point, my parents redid the full front porch and added a separate one at the other entrance, which was an addition to the original farm house. Thus, below my bedroom windows was a tin roof that made the rain sound lovely. Here's a photo of the front of the house when the porch was ripped off, mid-construction. Note, I shot this with my Kodak instamatic and attempted a panorama effect by taking two shots and lining them up in my photo album:
So as you're facing the house, the top two windows to the left of center? That was my room.
I was combing through an old album and noticed these shots, taken on different days but at around the same time. I was around 10 years olad, I think. I guess I spent a fair amount of time in my room and wasn't opposed to aiming my camera out the windows to capture the view.
The upper left one is looking towards our barn. Our driveway was newly paved. You can see a low, cinderblock structure as you start out the driveway; that was our "incinerator." At my mom's request, it replaced our burn barrel. (In PA they still burn their trash.)
Upper right is looking out the windows on the road side, across to one of our fields (the few rows adjacent to the road was where we grew our sweet corn). I was enthralled by the snow, apparently.
Lower left, I'm looking out towards the barn again. This was probably the same snow storm. You can see our swingset (which we had outgrown by the time this photo was taken) and our giant Buick Limited in the driveway.
Lower right, there's that same Buick (we called it "Mommy's Magic Car" because it had electric everything) parked in the garage across the road from the house. Beyond that? Fields and more fields. It looks like it was late Fall; there's dry corn waiting to be harvested and the trees on the ridges are without leaves.
These are not stunning examples of photography. The colors have long since faded (I attempted to rejeuvenate them with Picnik). But because these pictures represent my view when I was young, I wanted to preserve them.
