The Gift of a Childhood Home Remembered
I met Jocelyn in a business networking group, where I did a first time presentation on the Home Portraiture services I'd planned to offer. Jocelyn grabbed me immediately afterwards: her fiance Ben's parents were selling their longtime home, where he had spent his whole childhood with his brother. They had just begun getting the house ready; could I possibly schedule a shoot as soon as possible, to capture the home as he'd want to remember it and before it was staged for selling?
She put me in touch with Ben's mother, and the shoot was scheduled for that week. It was a large, beautiful colonial home in Melrose, Massachusetts. Jocelyn runs a landscaping business and had done all of the beautiful garden work in the front and back of the house herself.
Ben and his brother were both in their 30s now, and hadn't lived in this house for a number of years. I was charmed by how many details of their childhoods still remained preserved by their loving parents in these rooms: from the teddybear light switch plate leading to the attic playroom, to the pile of concert ticket stubs from all the music Ben had enjoyed in high school and college, to the trophies and childhood books leaned in the shelves. Ben's mother pulled me aside: "he always drank a glass of orange juice right here on the kitchen counter while he read the comics every morning. Could we just get a photo of that, a glass of orange juice next to the newspaper like it always used to be?"
After the shoot, I uploaded all of the images to an online album for Jocelyn to choose from for the book. In the end she couldn't decide what to exclude because they all felt important: I made a bigger book to include all of them, and the hardcover book was sent to her before Christmas. A few months later she emailed me:
"I have been meaning to write you to let you know how the book was received. Ben cried and he doesn't cry much. Ben's mom cried, his dad cried! Everyone was so touched. It was the best gift I could have given him. He is so tied to that house and to have it captured so beautifully in a book he will have forever is simply the best. I get points for that one! I am just so happy that you talked about it that one Tuesday and that you got to capture the pics before they moved. It really is such a perfect gift that I hope more people have."
