favorite places #9 the south

OK, so "the south" is maybe a little bit too all encompassing and sort of vague. What I'm referring to is actually more a state of mind than a particular place, what I like to think of as southern gothic. Imagine if you will air thick with humidity, the cloying scent of honeysuckle, lighting bugs on a summer evening, grand old houses beginning to decay, family secrets, skeletons in the closet, lemonade, screened in porches, having the bejesus scared out of you at age 8 by watching Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte on a little black and white TV (OK, so maybe that just happened to me), the sound of cicadas at night, crape myrtles in bloom, kudzu covered everything, and so on and so on...

 "...So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little."

Stephen King

Family history has it that on my fathers mothers side two sisters fled Georgia during Sherman's march during the Civil War and ended up bound for Kentucky. One sister was raped by the captain of the steamboat that they caught passage on and that's where my particular line of the family came from. Perfectly southern gothic.

My great grandfather Edward Ambrose Ford and my great grandmother Cora Woolbright Ford.

 

A Sunday afternoon.

My grandmother Myrtle May Ford Reid and her sister Ethel Lee Ford Egge.
Ethel Lee married a man named Elvis Henry Egge and moved away to Texas.  He was a baptist minister, she was a chemistry teacher.

Shirley's 6th birthday.

 

This photo came from a store in Savannah Georgia. I don't know who she was but her story can be whatever you want it to be.

My father, my aunt and their various cousins all looking just a little bit Lord of the Flies to me.

The next six photos are more from Savannah. The stories behind them are a mystery. Who were these people? What were their dreams? How did they live? The possibilities are endless...

Even now there are still ghostly apparitions haunting the everyday.

Along with a little  bit of southern charm.

And snippets  of the spooky and mysterious coloring our childhoods.

  

I like my pretty places colored with a bit of the unknown, some danger and traces of the past lurking close by... gardens full of flowers threatened by overgrowing vines...statues and dark water and light and shadows...houses once grand now falling into disrepair...memories of  grandeur overlapping the faded reality of today...

"Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going."
Tennessee Williams