Time apart

I enjoyed this article.

Continuity of family; it's so very true. We ridiculous humans emerge from our accidental family groupings carrying snatches of their obligations, duties, suffocating miseries and dilemmas and foolish mistakes and shifty compromises and doomed ambitions and hopes, then, in separation, we continue the process seamlessly, pretending we don't, before layering down another new generation over the past, and thinking this time it'll all be different. And it isn't. We just reinvent what went before, in a new setting, and a new time.

I wander around the house, photographing children, wondering what family celebrations we annually reproduce, beyond the baked potatoes and fish stocking.

I snap Squirrel, in the schoolroom. I like this photograph for what it says to me about the family in which I live. The room mixes disordered, multi-layered clutter and simple, quiet labour on a desk-bound detail. Here she is, enjoying solitude in the family when we all complain no-one leaves us alone. She is quiet amongst noise; intellectual labour in practical space. Sat in this old scullery turned bedroom, turned study, turned nursery, turned messy room, turned schoolroom, it's a second of time, flowing in a history of people and place, of moments significant, or moments unimportant because they are so unadorned and ordinary, so plain, and simple.