the 12 days of christmas

Portraits from Life

My maternal grandparent's house in Georgia is one consumed by history. For my grandmother, it is ancient history, and for my grandfather, the Civil War. His space in the basement is filled with books, memorabilia, and stacks of genealogical records. For the most part, this historical clutter is confined to its space in the basement.

The first floor seems to be a different place. The formal sitting room has instead furniture that could possibly be older than even my grandparents along with a collection of music boxes, one given to my grandmother by my grandfather for each of her birthdays. The dining room is formal as well, complete with glass-paneled wooden furniture housing the good china.

But history has seeped up through the floorboards. Also in the dining room, looking slightly out of place, is a painting. It is a painting of an old general store, one with two old-school gas pumps out in the front and a Coca-Cola refrigerator on the porch (we are in Atlanta after all). You've seen this general store a hundred times in movies. But I've seen this exact real one. It still exists, this general store, between the big new Kroger and the Chik-fil-A.

But it doesn't look quite the same. In the painting, the store stands alone, on a dirt road. Now defunct, left only for show, a historical landmark, it fades into the strip mall behind it. It has been moved back a few dozen yards from the road to make room for the re-widening that had to be done when the congestion of the city streets spilled over into the suburbs. Its glory days are gone.

This is why, whenever one of my grandparents would catch me looking at the painting in the dining room, they would say: You have to capture things as they are, because they will never stay the same.

All of this is just to say, that if I was somehow able to go back to that general store before the streets were widened and the Kroger showed up, I feel like I would meet the people from Portraits from Life there.