What does the past look like? There’s an old saying which touches on this by stating that one can’t go home again. And part of that refers to the simple fact that the world tends to move on over time. Things just won’t be how we left them. And the state of things as an adult will be much different than what we recall from childhood. But that wasn’t the case for Jack and Audrey Newton.
The siblings, and best friends, had inherited their old family home. The sad occasion of their parent’s passing was marked by the idea of a new opportunity for family bonding. Their family home was huge. The nine bedroom home was almost palatial. It was so big that the siblings had the idea of simply moving into it together. The Queen Anne-style home had a lot of amazing memories for the siblings. And amazingly enough they began to discover that they enjoyed making new memories as well.
However, it’s especially notable that family was such a central point in the sibling’s lives. This led them to treat much of the home as if it were a museum. Or perhaps it might be accurate to say that it was their youth enshrined to appreciate as an adult. Most siblings would tire of this sort of life together fairly quickly.
But the experiment of living back home again would continue for years. And in fact, it was how Audrey lived for the rest of her life. She passed in 2011, and Jack followed only four years later. During this time people really didn’t get a chance to look into the dwelling. It wound up shut off from the world for around seventy years. Now that one can actually see the inside it serves as amazing time capsule of sorts. It essentially replicates what life was like for a family in the 1940s. Of course the time wasn’t exactly a happy one for the world as a whole. One world war occured not too far into the shadow of the first. The great depression was making things even harder. The culture as a whole was fighting a metaphorical battle just as much as the world was a literal one.
This way of looking at the world might make the sibling’s eagerness to embrace the past more understandable. People often don’t appreciate things unless they’ve fought for it. And people needed to fight for happiness and security back in those days. Today a teddy bear might be loved for a while and quickly forgotten. But one can look at the bears from the sibling’s childhood and see the love and care which went into the design. They didn’t come off an assembly line. They were lovingly assembled by hand. And likewise, those and other toys were truly loved. Loved to a point where seventy years later they’re still in fantastic condition.
It’s not just the sibling’s toys that serve as a way to look into the past either. The siblings weren’t just trying to enshrine their own youth. They loved all aspects of their life as a family. Their childhood, but also their parents position in their lives. As such the siblings even preserved the design of the living room, bedrooms and a wide variety of other areas. At the moment the home remains preserved. And people who’ve become aware of it over the internet are obviously grateful for that fact. Video has ensured that some memory of it in that state will always remain. But it’s questionable whether it’ll serve as a museum of sorts or of the pieces will be auctioned off.
