the honey home

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janderhil (the Big News)

March 17, 2016

kentucky

a cloudy sunrise in july

Two weeks after Ephraim was born, my grandfather passed away.

So we packed up our newborn and headed to Kentucky to the funeral. I was a brand-new parent, and I was suddenly and painfully aware of the shifting climate of the family. My dad’s family had always been close, making sure to spend holidays together and hold reunions and reunite frequently, the families of the five Jarboe siblings convening at my grandparents’ house like so many streams returning to the spring. For a child, this was an incredibly comforting and secure ritual, and one that was taken for granted for a long time.
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the ham house

February 24, 2016

There’s a little building behind my parents’ house whose name might confuse some.

We’ve used it as a dog kennel, a chicken house, a storage unit, a garage for horse-drawn vehicles, and, most recently, a junk collector. But we’ve always called it the Ham House.

hamhouse 1

it’s seen better days.

What’s a Ham House? It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a building that was built for (and briefly used for) hanging and smoking hams.

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the kids’ room, before and after

January 11, 2016

Over Christmas break, I found myself in the position of watching while my husband and parents worked to clean out the hamhouse and basement at my childhood home (and watching while my boys ran around and played in the Kentucky countryside.)

I do not like sitting and watching.

I needed something to do. So…I did something.

boy room ba-3

This room was my room, growing up. It’s where I first flexed my decorator muscles. Its first incarnation was a carousel horse theme, complete with a wallpaper chair rail border with multicolored paint stamping underneath. And blue trim. (It was the 90’s.)

The second incarnation, the remnants of which are pictured above, was done during the summer of my freshman year of college. My roommate at the time helped me–it was fun, and I have always loved it, even now when faux finishes like dragging are seriously out of style. That’s still my favorite shade of green. I wish I had a picture of the room in its heyday, but all I have is the picture of what it looked like with beds for the boys hastily stuck in there, sheets covering the windows to aid with naps, and a couple of random pieces of furniture hanging out because there really isn’t another place for them in the house.

The boys really needed their own space, not a leftover-from-moms-youth-with random-furniture space, and since painting is something I am always willing to do, I got to work.  [Read more…]

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Well, hello. (You and 2016.)

January 03, 2016

So, how was your Christmas and New Year?

Mine was great, but I didn’t document much, because my blog crashed Christmas morning and just got back up on New Year’s Day. What a way to enforce a hiatus, right?

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beginnings

December 22, 2015

We’re at my childhood home for the holidays, but the agenda didn’t call for just enjoying the vacation with Christmas movies and hot chocolate.

No: we are project people.

We’re project people, and this is a big project. A big, big project. A big project that needed a big huge clean-out before the actual project could start.

cleaning out-18

This is a hamhouse. In the past, it was used for smoking hams. They were hung from the ceiling by strings and then smoked. My family has lived here for twenty-nine years, but we’ve never smoked hams in here. We’ve never smoked hams at all, actually. The strings are still hanging from the ceiling, though.

cleaning out

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the crop shop

May 03, 2014

There is a little roadside market near my parents’ house, just down the road from the now-defunct Little Store (which is across from The Ugly House, which isn’t even a house at all.) It sits on a straight stretch of 31-W that you long for when you’re stuck behind someone actually following the 55 mph speed limit.

I’m always getting passed on that straight stretch of road. Worse than a tractor.

I’ve never stopped at this store–I don’t think it was around when I lived here. But we swung in today on our way home from Chaney’s. I wanted to photograph this little slice of country life.

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It’s a pretty glamorous way to buy local produce. When I was a kid, you stopped on the side of the road to buy sweet corn off the back of someone’s pickup truck. This store had a fountain inside.

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I just now noticed that there was sorghum for sale. Sorry, Dad, for not picking any up.

honor system I was surprised that there was no one there, until I saw the paper on the counter.crop shop-8 crop shop-12 crop shop-13 flower skyCountry life, indeed.

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this old house

April 18, 2014

We moved out to the farm when I was two; I have been in awe of that house for as long as I can remember. It was well-worn, then, but not run-down. It had a large front porch with a flat roof that you could go out and stand on.

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We called it “The-House-Across-The-Street,” a sensible name, as we were in the habit of giving most things. The market at the crossroads was called “The Little Store”; the white structure catty-corner to it was called “The Ugly House”; the room in our house with the green carpet was “The Green Room,” and the one with gold carpet, “The Yellow Room.”

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As I got older, I spent a lot of time imagining what it was like inside. Huge stone fireplaces, a sweeping, grand staircase. “Beautiful” decor as only an eight, nine, ten-year-old girl can dream up. It was almost always devoid of inhabitants, though people did live there from time to time. It had been built, I believe, by the grandparents of the man who owned the property and the fields surrounding it.

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Our yard was fenced to keep the dogs and sheep away from the road, and we were not to cross over to that house. At least I assumed we weren’t, as I never did. It wasn’t our property and it wasn’t our house, and I never so much as peeked through the windows to see if what I imagined about the inside was true. Not until I was twelve, and the cat we’d had since before I was born went missing. I was asked (or it was suggested, and I obliged) to go over to the house and see if she had somehow managed to get trapped inside.   So it was at twelve that I was able to do what I had been longing to do–go through the gate, cross the street, and look into that great House-Across-The-Street.

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Seventeen years later I still recall that moment as one of the greatest disappointments of my life. What I saw was devastating to my dream-filled, girlish head.

There was a staircase, but not sweeping. Fireplaces, but not grand. Wallpaper peeled off the walls in great hanging sheets. Holes in the walls left the planking underneath exposed. It was filthy and falling apart. I didn’t look very long before going back across the road to our house.

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I was twenty-one and a newlywed before I ever actually went inside. During a visit to my childhood home, I followed my adventurous husband across the street and into the house, almost bailing at the door when he said, ponderously, “This is just like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Inside we found nothing but a stop sign, some trash, and one solitary armchair in an upstairs bedroom, seated in front of a window. The stairs looked ready to collapse at any moment, and I’m still wondering at why we ever climbed them and how someone didn’t get hurt.

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Over the years it has continued to deteriorate. The porch was torn down, and in the process, the foundation was compromised. The paint on the front doors faded even further. The chimneys began to crumble, and a family of vultures has moved into one of them. Despite its eerie aura and silent misery, I’ve never found the place to be ominous. At least, not that I remember. But I can’t help but feel an intense sorrow when I see it–even though it’s one of my favorite places to photograph. I stick the lense of my camera through a broken window to capture the interior, and I feel sick to my stomach.

When I’m done taking pictures, Jeremy asks if I want to go look inside.

“No,” I say. “It’s just too sad.”

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I’m Erin, Christian, mother of seven, photographer, second-generation homeschooler, full-time homemaker.

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