Posts Tagged ‘Family Photos’

I don’t have a lot of photos of us on display in my house.  Perhaps I’m odd, but my feeling is that I don’t need to wallpaper my house with photos of me, the Mister, and our families.  I have a few personal photos on display in the private areas of my home (like our bedroom), but I don’t have any in the public areas: living room, staircase, etc.  The photos I do display of us were taken while traveling and doing fun stuff like white-water rafting.  I don’t even have what is viewed as the requisite photo for a married woman: a big, formal portrait of me in my wedding dress or of us in our wedding attire.  No, I prefer to decorate with photos I take during our travels.  The photos in my dining area were taken by me during our trip to Berlin, Germany in 2004 and on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail in 2009:

Dining Area Photos

Here’s a close-up of one of the photos hanging above our bar.  It’s one of the copper pots used to distill bourbon at Woodford Reserve Distillery in KY:

Bourbon Trail - Woodford Reserve

The people who visit my home usually comment that my house looks like it’s from the pages of a catalog like Pottery Barn or Ballard Designs.  I take that as a compliment!    I think photos taken by me that don’t feature me or the Mister are just as meaningful as ones with us in them.  Besides, I don’t want a house that looks like it’s from an episode of  Designed to Sell.  You know what I mean.  How many times have you seen one of those shows about staging a home for sale which feature upset parents being told to clean up their kid’s clutter and remove all their family photos from their walls?  Admit it; you know the house looks a hundred times better when all that stuff is gone!

This brings me to my in-laws.  The Mister’s siblings have recently started replicating, and my mother-in-law constantly sends us cheaply-framed photos of her grandkids as “gifts”.  We have repeatedly asked her not to send us photos.  Again, keep in mind that we don’t even have framed photos of ourselves in our home.  So, why on Earth would we, a happily childfree couple, feel the need to plaster our house with framed photos of other people’s kids?  I’m extremely annoyed that my mother-in-law keeps sending us photos of her grandkids in cheap plastic frames even though we’ve told her to stop.  She’s being totally obnoxious about it.  Besides, if we wanted to display framed photos, we could easily buy our own frames and do so.  She sends us hundreds of photos each month despite our insistence that she just post them online so we can view them.    (My in-laws are not luddites; the father-in-law owns a computer business and knows how to use things like Flickr and Picasa!)

What do you think?  Is it tacky to assume other people want framed photos of your kids?  I think so, but I’m probably in the minority since I’m childfree.  Keep in mind that the Mister’s brother and sister live hundreds of miles away from us, and neither of us are involved in their kids’ lives, nor would we be even if we lived closer to them.  I know some childfree folks adore being doting Aunts and Uncles, but we’re not of that inclination.  We’re just not crazy about kids, even those related to us. 

Technically, she’s my Great-Great Aunt Maude: my Great Grandmother Effie’s sister.  However, we always called her Aunt Maude.  She is, to my knowledge, the longest lived member of the Cherokee side of the family.  She died at the ripe old age of 102.

Aunt Maude

That’s her when she was about 97 standing on the front porch of her ramshackle little cabin.  She had broken her foot while trying to carry a load of firewood into the house, thus the crutches.  I’m sad the picture didn’t show the long braid hanging down her back.  She always wore her hair in a braid, and she truly looked like a little Cherokee squaw.

Aunt Maude was also something of a rebel for her time.  For starters, she and her sons, Buck, Cub, and Squirrel (not their legal names but that’s what we always called them) made moonshine.   They sold some of it to support themselves, but they also drank a lot of it too.  I think that’s where my Grandpa learned to make moonshine and probably why he decided to enter the family business from early 1950s to the mid 1970s.  Aunt Maude also grew her own tobacco and smoked a pipe.  If you went to her house, you usually found her sitting on her front porch in a rocking chair, smoking her pipe and often wrapped in a quilt.

Secondly, she was an animal whisperer.  I generalize that because she really could commune with any animal.  At one time she had a pet opossum who would crawl into bed with you at the ass-crack of dawn, wet from the morning dew, and she would scold you if you complained about it.  She also fed a mama skunk and her babies through a hole in the floor next to her old wood stove.  However, you had to leave the room when she fed the skunk because the skunk would spray anyone but Aunt Maude.  Finally, she had a black bear as a pet.  She scooped him up as a cub after some asshole shot his mother, and she raised him on a mixture of condensed milk and Karo syrup.  She always thought he would return to the wild when he got older, but he never did.  He knew where his bread was buttered.  Why forage in the woods when he had free room and board at Aunt Maude’s cabin?  This doesn’t even include all the other critters she half tamed: raccoons, foxes, and even an old red-tailed hawk.

Despite her dubious enterprise of moonshining, Aunt Maude was a hard worker and strong as an ox for her size and age.  She could carry a huge bundle of firewood on her back like it was nothing.  She maintained a huge wild blackberry patch behind the cabin and could make the best blackberry cobbler you ever tasted in your life.   And the floors in her cabin were so clean they shined.  You could eat off Aunt Maude’s humble wood floors.