A Remembrance of Places Both Empty and Full

In 1971, my parents purchased an 1890 white clapboard schoolhouse in Canton, New York, for $1,000. Abandoned and sitting alone on an acre of land, the building was falling apart. They set to work making it habitable, welcoming my sister in 1972, when the floors were still dirt, and bringing me home there from the hospital in Potsdam in March 1975. Two years later, we moved away, but if Gaston Bachelard is right that our first enclosures disproportionately inform the architecture of our psyches and our capacity to dream, then my own mind was formed in the shape of that house.

Is that why Robert Adams’s photograph seems strangely familiar to me? The picture is centered, sturdy, black-and-white. Our schoolhouse was less symmetrical than Adams’s church, but it shared a blunt simplicity: white horizontal boards stretching up to a peaked roof capped with a belfry in one structure, a steeple crowned by a cross in the other. One was a discarded, secular building in upstate New York, the other a functional religious sanctuary in a small Colorado town (the population of Ramah was 130 as of 2020). The