I hadn't planned on posting this, and was just going to e-mail the draft to family, but so many people remember and loved this wonderful old place, and I've decided to share it.
"1203" as the family called it, was built by my great-grandfather J.N. Bray sometime around the turn of the century. My widowed grandmother lived there for most of her life, my father grew up there, and we children spent so much time there, we could have called it home, too.
Somehow these pictures were misplaced in boxes and boxes of memorabilia, and my brother Mac has been encouraging me to locate them, in his oh-so-subtle Mac-ish way, for over a year.
Well, I found them. Finally. I think they were taken shortly before the house was torn down, when everybody had moved out, the furniture left strewn about haphazardly.
"Are you disappointed?" I asked Mac. He'd sounded disappointed. "Well, yeah," he admitted. "I remember that hall looking big as a football field. I guess things just look bigger when you're little."
We also probably had it looking like Downton Abbey in our mind's eye.
But it's more than that We remember it full of people and life. It was home to generations, and had witnessed births and marriages and deaths, parties and funerals, and countless holiday gatherings. In these pictures, it looks so sad, so empty, so forlorn.
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