Praeterita

  I took this photo ten years, in February 2011. There are so many things about it that are so different from now that I feel I'm looking at something from someone else's life: The location is the living room of an old farmhouse that my wife and I owned back then, in a very small town in northwestern Illinois not far from the Mississippi River. The old fireplace, the old wood pocket doors, are all original, but I repainted the walls and put up a faux tin ceiling. The watercolour over the fireplace is something I did back in London in the 1990s. The ceramic vase was from a ceramic artist who had a small workshop and store on the little high street in this town. Finally, I took the photo on a Samsung flip-phone, so it was probably 160 Kb, as opposed to the multi-megabyte photos we all take with our smartphones now. I imagine this is true for all of us: the older we get, we can look back at more than one time in our lives with the amazement of people discovering the ancient Egypti...