The first of a new series of posts, many drawn from my Tumblr, that attempt to evoke the settings of my family’s lives through photographs.

Wilson, North Carolina, April 2011.

I was at home, prowling the streets on a limpid blue morning, when out of the corner of my eye, this window.  I wheeled around, parked and nosed about.  The house was a shotgun, one of hundreds built in East Wilson pre-World War I to house a flood of ex-farmers trading tobacco fields for tobacco factories.  The house had been abandoned as a regular home, but showed signs of fairly recent usage as a shelter for the homeless or perhaps those otherwise wanting to keep their business out of sight.  The door had been ripped from an interior room and laid against an empty window frame, which faced the street on the broadside of the house.  The door’s cool, lemony yellow was a calming contrast to the rough grayness of the house’s siding.  When I went home next, the house was gone.

© Lisa Y. Henderson