When I was about five, my parents divorced. I have very vague memories from that time. In one of my clearer memories, I was standing in the driveway of our house, presumably lost in thought, when suddenly I noticed that dozens of red ants had climbed up my bare legs, onto my shorts, and had reached my waist. I panicked, jumped around, and brushed them off.
I don’t know how my parent’s divorce was able to creep up on all of us, unnoticed. Suddenly, I found myself standing in the hallway of our house knowing that my father’s furniture was going to be moved out later that day. In an attempt to capture and retain him, I found my brother’s camera and took photos of the old pieces of Chinese furniture. Prior to that, I have no memories of my father being in that house other than symbolically. I assume that he had mostly been either at work or in his study. I don’t know what happened to those photos that I took and I believe that the act of creating them was more important than the pictures themselves.
At the time I didn’t realize that we were all going to move out of that house. My mum, my siblings, and I moved far away, into a house so old that the roof was made from straw and the floors were so uneven that a ball would not stay still on them. It was a house that was as old as Shakespeare, and one that the adults believed was haunted. We moved there with…
