Summers in West Virginia

Recently, I've been dabbling in photography. Now that I have my hands on my nice little DSLR camera, I have been taking pictures and editing them. I've been learning by experience why photographers take so many pictures of the same thing with little variation : what looks sharp and clear in the viewfinder might actually be soft and blurry once you see the image on a larger screen. So far my best photos have been of antiques.

In early June, my parents and I went to an estate sale and auction in a very small, rural West Virginia town. The estate was a gorgeous mansion, built in the early 20th century and remodeled in the past ten years. I am sure that whoever ended up with the mansion is planning to turn it into a very successful bed and breakfast. (I cannot say that phrase out loud. Bed and Breakfast. I accidentally say it Bread and Beckfast.)

Many of these antiques, some of which were from the turn of the century (1900 ish) were being auctioned off from the mansion.

Looks like he knows a secret

A noble steed

Du Pont

 Have you heard of the black stereotype called the Mammy? This is essentially the motherly black maid, the one that lived with a white family and raised their children for them.

 According to this Jim Crow caricature of black women, the Mammy was a fat, happy, motherly woman.

She was content to live out her life as a slave. She was too busy raising the white children of the household to want freedom.

The Mammy loved her white family. They were her entire world.

 She might have had many of her own children, but as this caricature she was almost completely desexualized.

She was only fit to be a domestic worker. She had no black friends.




The picture below is something that I am titling "Reflection of West Virginia." It to me embodies what people think of when they envision West Virginia: old things and fat people.

West Virginia in a Nutshell? Not exactly.

While there are lots of people in West Virginia who are overweight, there are also many who take advantage of the state's abundance of hiking, biking, and canoeing areas. It's such a lush, beautiful state.

The Greenbrier River, after a long weekend of rain, is close to the top of the river bank.

 It is true, though, that a lot of the things in West Virginia are old. Many places are in disrepair, and many a house or car gets patched up over the years but never gets repaired or replaced the way it needs to be.

My childhood tree house

This was the old tree house that my brother and our friends and I played in when we were younger. You can see now that it is used to store a kayak, a lawn mower and a grass seeder. We had some good fun in this tree house. I strung up colorful strings and bells on the railing. Our friends and I tied a giant rope to the top of the metal slide and used it to climb up the slide, which was very useful when playing the lava game. (You know the game where you pretend the floor is made of lava? We pretended that the ground was made of lava and had four kids try to climb up the slide at the same time so that we wouldn't fall into the lava. Sometimes our shorts would get caught on the nails at the top of the slide. It was a fun game. I'm sure we screamed a lot.)

The Cool Restaurant

One of the other things my brother, our friends and I did with this tree house was turn it into a restaurant. Our very original and inspired restaurant name was The Cool Restaurant. You can see that it came equipped with a plastic kitchen. The lettering of our name was originally very colorful.

The fire pole

In West Virginia fashion, The Cool Restaurant was a fast food restaurant. The fire pole served as the drive thru. Our most popular item was the leaf cake, consisting of a large oak leaf sprinkled with pine needles.

I would probably not dare to set foot inside this tree house today. The main reason for that is that I am sure that there are many spiders, squirrels and maybe snakes that have made it their home since we stopped using it. Wouldn't want to disturb too many nests...

This is the swing that we would play on all the time as kids. You could swing really really high if you wanted to, given that the branch the swing was on was pretty high up. However, the best utilization of this swing was, in my opinion, sitting or lying in the seat, twisting the ropes around really, really tight - to the point that the twist hit the top of your head - and then unspinning the swing in all its dizzying glory. If you wanted to take that one step further, you'd also try to swing back and forth while spinning in a circle. The plastic swing is a little cracked up now, and the ropes are fraying. There are no young kids to play with the swing anymore.

Here's some additional "American Pastoral" for you from West Virginia.

My parents

The fire that I made

The front yard on a sunny afternoon

Me, Fire Master

I plan to take a lot of pictures while I am living in Île de la Réunion. Maybe some of them will have stories and memories attached like the photos I took in West Virginia do.