I traveled back to West Virginia today on a mission- to find some locations to film and visit some old friends. As I traveled down the winding back roads of the small town I grew up in I remembered my grandmothers old house, a place I never experienced while she was living there but had heard so many stories about and had visited with my dad as a kid. It fell into disrepair long ago and stands exactly as it did the day my grandmother left, complete with 80's blue carpet and floral wallpaper. Her and her husband at the time had built the gray brick split foyer home themselves. Pictures in family albums show my dad posing in a blizzard in the driveway and the wood my dad chopped is still stacked on the back porch.
I pulled in and walked the permiter of the house before talking to an old friend of my grandmother who still lived next door. I was given permission to go take some pictures and film. After finding an unlocked garage door I found myself inside and in a way taken back to the times when my family lived there. The Holidays in front of the fireplace in the basement, dinners in a dining room now filled with peeling wallpaper and the smell of a decomposed cat that had wandered in and never made it out. Cans of food still sat out on the kitchen counters. It really was a surreal place, frozen in time. I ended up leaving after another neighbor took up issue with me being there and I didn't want to cause anymore trouble. I locked the house up and left fulfilled that after years of hearing the memories I finally got to see a piece of family history in person.
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