Today I got a message on Facebook from my nephew Brandon. He was working on an oral report and asked about my Dad's house in Old Harbor and what had happened to it after the earthquake and tidal wave of 1964. Boy, that got me back into the past. Old pictures, old times, Old Harbor. I was thankful to find that I had a picture of the house my Dad built in Old Harbor. When my youngest brother Mark was still alive my Mom normally lived at the same small house he was at. This house was built by our family for Mom after my Dad died. It ended up that Mark lived there and in 2010 he died there. (Boy does time fly!) After Mark died my husband Doug and I ended up being the ones that cleaned up the house and took care of Mark's animals. Since there would be no one living there after we moved Mom out into an assisted living facility Doug drained the pipes and winterized it. There it sits to this day. If I had the money I would pay the taxes on it and I would make it liveable again. Alcoholism is tough on material possessions!
We went through what little paperwork we could find that looked important then brought them home with us in case it was needed for Mom's future. We arranged with the neighbors to check the mailbox every so often and we stopped by there to pick it up, when needed.
As Doug was picking things up in the yard he found a garbage container filled with trash and in it was some photographs! This sort of stuff happens when someone is alcoholic. I am so glad that Doug checked this stuff and salvaged the pictures. They are precious to me, even this one picture of the house that Dad built. One thing that was not salvageable was the big bear hide that my brother owned from a hunting trip that he went on. It was wet after sitting in the drip of the eave for we don't even know how long. Sad to let things go that would have been a link to someone you loved. But when death is fresh on your heart it is hard to think of 'stuff.' So we left that behind but brought some of the old pictures home from the trash barrel.
Shortly after my brother died my Mom lost her mind. Maybe this is a protection? Personally, I believed she had suffered a stroke, but the doctor said there was no sign of any NEW strokes. He did tell me that it appeared that she had survived five strokes in her past and that she had recovered from them without medical care. Mom does not even remember Mark right now. She asks once in a while who the boy was that used to live at her house. " It was Mark, Mom." "Mark?" It is amazing to me how she forget someone that had such a big part of her every day.
I have a new laptop and my first ever web cam. :-) I was trying to figure out how to get my pictures from my phone to my laptop, and saw the webcam. So there you have it. A new way to take a picture of an old house.
Ha ha!
