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Apr 6 – Ibon Perez - @IbonPerezTV

Nadie nos enseña a vaciar la casa de nuestros padres o abuelos. Ese álbum de fotos, la vajilla que sólo usaban en Navidad, el abrigo que aún huele a ellos.  Enciclopedias tiradas al lado de un contenedor. No es solo ordenar: es despedirse. Y a veces, eso pesa más que una mudanza.

 Nobody teaches us to empty the house of our parents and grandparents. The family album, the dishes they only used on Christmas, the coat that still smells of them or encyclopaedias thrown next to a garbage container. It is not only to put in order: it is to say farewell. And sometimes, that weighs more heavily than a house move.

The above lovely but sad statement by a Spanish journalist affected me today when I read it in my Twitter/X feed. I look around the countless framed photographs on my walls, all those Mexican dishes, Rosemary’s shoes in the closet and I obsessively think how hard it will be for me to get rid of them little by little so that my daughters will not have to go through the pain.

So avoid doing any of it and plan to do it tomorrow or next week. I believe that I will be postponing all this until it will be too late for me. I will have met my oblivion.

A pleasant distraction from all the above is to go into my warm oficina and go through my negatives of the family and especially of Rosemary. Looking at the negatives it is impossible for me not to think,"She was alive when I took these."

It was sometime in 1969 that I took quite a few photographs of Rosemary nude from the waist up. I was much too shy to go below it.

Puttering in my darkroom, when I had one in our Kerrisdale home, was a usual activity on weekends.  While it is Monday today, puttering in my oficina is almost as pleasant. Not completely, as in Kerrisdale I would have gone up from my basement darkroom and shown Rosemary some wet prints on a tray.