Punchlist Self Portrait

This past June, I posted a picture that I took nine years prior, in 2016. The shadowy silhouette in “Inadvertent Self Portrait” was an accidental “ghost glimpse” captured while documenting something else altogether. Today I return to the same topic. This morning’s punchlist self portrait is an almost identical scenario, and it occasions me to tell you what’s on my mind lately in the admixture of property and people in Rosslyn Redux.

I’d like to start with the perennial punchlist that guides our day-to-day, season-to-season stewardship of this sanctuary we call Rosslyn. But first I’ll prologue today’s reflection with a few words from my June 2025 update that remain central to this topic.

Sometimes, self-conscious, I stall. Too much belly button gazing. Too self referential. Too much me. I stall and stutter-step, questioning, uncertain. Reoriented and refocused, I begin again. And sometimes I don’t discover myself in the shot until later, an inadvertent self portrait.

[…]

I laugh, thinking to myself, that this web of stories and images and memories and field notes I call Rosslyn Redux intends to be about our home, and yet it’s inevitably about us. (Source: Inadvertent Self Portrait)

Inadvertent and inevitable, my personal story (as well as Susan and my combined story) is braided into my Rosslyn story. Untangling, one of my objectives over the last three years, has proven more difficult (and less meaningful) than I’d anticipated.

Back to the punchlist. Projects are an ever present part of owning a “heritage property” and Rosslyn’s rehab ad infinitum has provided an especially generous abundance of projects. We prune down the list only to witness it sprout once again. Our tool for managing this rather organic punchlist is Trello. Year in. Year out. A giant interactive user manual and project management environment for this project sprouting property.

Because Rosslyn’s meta punchlist lives in Trello, and because Trello lives in my phone, I’m always updating it. And so it evolves, occasionally shrinking, but mostly static or expanding, a ticker tape chronicle of our Rosslyn adventure.

So it was that I found myself this morning (following a pulse quickening row in the Vermont Dory) standing on the gangway between the waterfront stairs and the boathouse. Over the weekend I’d noticed a small loose section of fir beadboard visible through the upper window sash. I mentioned it to Glen, snapped an image to post on Trello indicating the specific location in need of attention, and then I noticed it. My punchlist self portrait.

At first I decided to take another photo, angling the phone/camera to remove my image. Distracting. Unhelpful.

But then I opted to stick with what I have. Good enough for the task at hand. And a chance to reflect on my relationship with Rosslyn. On our inevitably intertwined narrative. On my growing awareness that part of my failure this last three years of daily old house journaling has been a hesitance to reveal much of my own story and much of Susan and my story, often opting to document current doings and and contemplate overarching themes of homeness that fascinate me.

But standing on our Lake Champlain waterfront after invigorating exercise and turning my mind (and camera) to the next of many small puzzle pieces in our almost twenty year historic rehabilitation of our home, I caught sight of myself. In plain sight. Hiding from view. And for a fleeting moment I opted to crop myself out.

Why?