My mother retired at the end of the spring and moved to Arizona, leaving the house that she lived in since 2004, where i spent most of my childhood. I spent some time there over the course of the summer, in and out but always wanting to be there longer than i was able to, moving and cleaning and making a little bit of work.

When we finished cleaning the house out and it was finally empty something happened where really quickly every childhood memory i thought i had forgotten unlocked itself and transformed into a bird flying at hyperspeed beak-first toward my chest. I remembered all the memories at once projected in three-dee onto the house’s cleaned-out rooms. Though writing now, I’m considering that maybe i wasn’t the one remembering it all as much as i may have been just experiencing the house’s memories, that maybe i was made into a vessel in order for it to purge the events that it had witnessed and stored somewhere for a long while. What is “a long while” for a house? I anthropomorphize the house in a way that makes me believe that the minutes stretch longer for it than they do for us - that the house sits calmly in its regal and moldy car-seat where its understanding of time is contained only in little bits of fog and conversation and droplets of water. Is that confusing for the house? Does my understanding of time skip around then too when i streak my dirty face against the house’s glass?

And does it feel good for houses to release what they have seen of us? Is it better for them when we’re gone? They’re tasked with bearing an almost unbearable weight; they’re charged with sculpting every occurrence that happens within them into a wisp of memory that feathers in the baseboards and tickles the insides of the drywall until they retch. And yet their walls still somehow do not collapse. It’s a feat of god that my mother and I didn’t kill our house, our house which seeped into its pores all our misunderstandings and griefs and storming-out-and-then-ashamedly-back-ins. Like a peace lily how it soaked up all the fumes from the air. But there were handsome times too and it sheltered us with honor and sweetness and we didn’t really have to pay with that much blood at all.

So in late July 2024 the house was empty again. The house looked like it was breathing finally. It was sunny and some dust hung in the air and the sun did the thing to the dust that it sometimes does in the late afternoon where it makes everything twinkle and pause. Still in my memory-state I went upstairs and stepped through the attic window onto the roof to drunk dance with the house for a bit. I tried to lend it my eyes to see through but they’re not that good to begin with and anyway the house didn’t want them. It didn’t need them, i mean. I didn’t tell Virginia where i was going and since the car was all packed up already i knew that he would come looking for me soon. I could hear him milling about downstairs sort of gently prodding through the space to conduct a futile investigation of my disappearance. I knew he wouldn’t find me on the roof and although i wasn’t hiding from him i also couldn’t find the energy to call out to him to tell him where i was. I was trying to time travel. Or i was time traveling, or something. The attic roof overlooks the backyard which contains a stump that was still a stump when we first moved in before it flaked wood shavings off for years and then changed into a molten depression in the ground, sickly as if a plastic surgeon had tried to reconstruct a hole in a face by stretching the surrounding skin over it until it looks like a hole with skin stretched over it. And then it changed again although nobody knows when into normal grass and nobody can see the stump now but me.

In the end it was Townes who found me and yelped at me through the window and told me to stop sapping up all that sap. He stood there panting until i came back in which was a torturous and effective strategy since his mouth is built on these big squeaky hinges that rain slop and hot air balloons and all the time he tries to make you an accomplice to his wet crimes. I didn’t want to leave the house the way a baby doesn’t want to get birthed but i had to and i did so because of the metaphor of Wisconsin. And also because of my mom’s stupid property manager who turns out is the villain of this whole story because i don’t know who else to blame for the past twenty years.

So the photograph isn’t much really i just felt like i had to try to memorialize the space in some way before it got painted white and i left. When i was a kid we made the whole attic blue and i painted a big butterfly on the wall and then some smaller butterflies around the big one. I stuck 3d gemstone stickers up on the walls too and they clung on for the whole twenty years. After the painters came to make it white again i went up there and they had pried off the gemstones (which probably required a substantial amount of human fortitude) and they laid all over the ground shimmering and plastic and sticking to the bottoms of your feet. I considered putting them in my pocket but i felt like i was already taking more than i could bear.

Though i don’t make them often it felt right to try to make a self portrait in the space - something about the decoration of my tattoos echoed the decoration of the walls and made me confront a fear of growing up from a bad child into a bad adult. Some of my childhood drawings/sculptures/artifacts are scattered around the frame, as well as some of my dad’s old motocross trophies and the polka dot blanket i grew up with that my mother always put out for me when i visited later in life. I donated it to the Y. During the first birthday party i had after my dad died i took one of the trophies and crawled under the futon and didn’t let anyone touch me. I turned into a giant watermill running on a clown car engine and the pistons went like this knock knock knock.

So I shot me up on a 6x7cm on the school’s Pentax and the negative turned out impossibly crisp. Back in Wisconsin, last week i printed it on some 16”x20” silver gelatin paper from 1982 that i hadn’t played with too much yet. It ended up producing a really hazy, fragmented texture and it disappeared nearly all of the crispness of the negative (nice!). The texture of the paper seemed to paint my skin into the wall which really vibes with the confusion of it all. The first darkroom i ever worked in was one that i constructed in the bathroom of that house in 2010. In some of the last weeks that that i spent there, Virginia and i set up a darkroom in the bathroom and we got a little toasted on fixer fumes and we tried to print really really really small photographs. We barely fit in the room together. We shot the gun every day.

The Blue in the Attic in the House

16”x20” silver gelatin print on paper from 1982, wood from the backyard, teddy

2024