the home on Forest
The intersection of place and story sends us the world over. We gawk at brown historical markers, pointing out what happened where. We're curious and somehow we know that the criss cross of our stories across time and space makes for a very peculiar alchemy of vital progress. Something happened once here. Maybe it will happen again. We're pretty sure things are happening now. Maybe all these details and faces and dates line up to point to an invisible thread connecting us all to cosmic meaning.
The story of a home is especially weighty. Homes are at the center of how things get started and how things end. Homes can give us roots, grounding us, giving us not only a place to belong, but a contextual frame in which our stories play themselves out.
A few months back, I photographed the Calahan family at their historic home in Shreveport on Forest Avenue. They shared the story of this sweet spot on the earth where northwest Louisiana magnolia trees meet Spanish Colonial Revival style stucco and I was rapt.
Way back in the 1920's, then attorney Huey P. Long built this home for his family with the sudden windfall that came his way after winning a case against Commercial National Bank. Desinty Calahan had shown me a photo of Long and his wife and three kids on the porch.
We remade the photo, almost 100 years later. Different family, same house.
Huey P Long, Rose McConnell Long, and their three children sit on the front porch of their Shreveport, Louisiana home in the mid 1920's at their Forest Avenue home. Long was the 40th Governor of Louisiana.
Blaine Calahan, Destiny Calahan, and their three children sit on the front porch of their Shreveport, Louisiana home in the early 2020's at the same home on Forest.
God only knows what tragedy and triumph these walls have seen in the past century. For now, it's filled with happy and charming children, a beautiful family and a lot of life. Roots are growing down as these children grow up. It's the Calahan's turn to give it all a go.
"That you are here—that life exists and identity,That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."
Walt Whitman