Alone On A Limb: Our Old House

Showing posts with label Our Old House. Show all posts

Friday, July 07, 2023

Sheila's Fans

Sheila has sorta collected hand held fans since we have been hosting a party for Independence Day each year. Independence Day seems to almost always fall in July which is a hot month and hand held fans can be useful in moving the air a bit as well as shooing flies and mosquitoes. Over the 30 years since that first party in 1993 she has accumulated a pretty good basket full. Some have seen a lot of use. They represent lots of different parts of our lives over these three decades: a wedding, historical events, the olympics, businesses, politics, watermelon, theatre, school, healthcare, and more. This year they were left out and got wet from the rain. Since many were spread on a table to dry I decided to group them together for a picture.

Monday, December 26, 2022

White (Second Day Of) Christmas!

I'm seventy-five years old and I still get a little excited over a dusting of snow.

So I walked out and took a few pictures. I may just call the grandgirls -- they're on California time -- and show them some snow. They spent part of Christmas Day at the beach!

Later...

We walked around the yard as we FaceTimed with Clemmie, Ruth, Suzie, and Brannon. And Granny even made the girls a (minimalist) snowman atop a concrete bench...

Sunday, October 23, 2022

Spirit Halloween, The Movie

When the producers of this movie approached us last fall about using our house for set location we reluctantly turned them down. We had scheduled a road trip to Southern California and a long stay there with our daughter, son-in-law, and three granddaughters. We would not be home for the filming.

But they persisted and agreed to pay us and also to pay our nephew, Andrew, who agreed to be on hand to watch the house and make sure all went well. They agreed to careful take down my Christmas decorations so they could decorate the house for Halloween and then replace the Christmas decorations when they were finished. So we relented.

I admit I was a bit uneasy about it, but both Andrew and our neighbor Joan Ledbetter took lots of pictures and sent them to us so we could see what was going on.

Click this picture to see more pictures of our yard from Andrew and Joan.

Our impression was that our house would appear very briefly in the movie. The trailer seemed to confirm that.

Then Friday we attended a special showing of the movie at the Desoto Theater. I kept my phone handy hoping to quickly snap the scene with our house. Turned out our house was often frame very often.

My pictures aren't great:

Christopher Lloyd is the big name in the movie though his appearance was brief.

A costume contest was part of the fun-- an all-way tie was declared and all the costumed participants received a pass to this year's RIFF!

Here's our front porch early in the movie.

This is the lead character walking on the sidewalk in front of our house.

One of the scenes shot in our front yard.

Trick-or-Treaters on Avenue A across from our house.

Other parts of the movie were filmed at the old Toys-R-Us building at Mount Berry Mall, the deserted Celanese buildings at Riverside, Georgia School for the Deaf and the namesake cave in Cave Spring. Of course, through the magic of cinema these locations were meshed and melded and molded into a completely different geography of the imagination.

Thursday, May 05, 2022

This Old House

Our new neighbor Kady called us to the fence to ask some questions about her old house (actually a couple of years older than ours!) During our discussion she showed the cellphone pics of a page from a city directory she found at the library. Wow! It is the OLDEST image of OUR HOUSE that I have ever seen! Wow. I love this. I can't wait to make a better copy.

The label reads: "RESIDENCE OF HON. WM. A. WRIGHT, WEST ROME"

William A. Wright bought our house from James A. Bale on Dec. 11, 1871 (Deed Book S, Page 76) and deeded it to Mrs. Mary A. Wingfield Dec. 28, 1894 (Deed Book YY, Page 283) So I think this image would likely date between the annexation of Desoto into Rome (1885) and 1894.

Look at that fence. And the street lamp. And the cresting. And the slate roof. And the baby Magnolia at the back that is now huge.

Monday, May 02, 2022

May Flowers

As May begins here on the banks of the Oostanaula, our garden is still choked with weeds and marred by neglect, but the same factors which have inspired the weeds to flourish have also brought beautiful and prolific blooms.

Sheila walks through the weedy path past several varieties of irises at the foot of the levee.

Ain't they pretty?

I think I will buy a weed torch; I just despise using weed killer.

The blackberry blossoms are giving way to lots of little green fruits.

Only three flowers on the peonies so far.

The Knock-Out roses are gorgeous.

These last three pictures are from a few days earlier:

The first peony.

Volunteer oxalis at the back steps.

Another Knock-out rose.

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Irises

Last year two of my neighbors (Carolyn McGinnis & Nena Dake) generously shared their iris plants with me as they were thinning theirs. So now, despite the fact that I have let weeds crowd my garden this spring, look at the gorgeous blooms I have. (No wide angle shots though till I get the weeds under control!)

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Azalea Time!

The azaleas in our back yard are in prime time today. I wish I had three times as many. Way back in the seventies sometime Sheila and I drove over to Sand Mountain -- a huge plateau in Northeast Alabama -- and purchased 30 of these large azaleas. We dug and fertilized thirty holes in our front yard on Cedar Avenue, and planted 'em. They were gorgeous through the eighties and early nineties. Somehow they petered ut after that and are all gone now. But for a couple of decades that yard was just glorious for for a few weeks every spring. I may make similar effort here one of these days. For now, though, we have these to enjoy each spring.