Six years ago, right out of college and desperate to do something creative, a friend and I began a small houseware and purse company called LoftCraft. Between my other odd jobs, I’d spend hours sitting at my grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine –the kind that folds out of the table top — turning the wheel by hand as I directed materials under the needle. I’d create tornadic messes in the living room of the top floor apartment two friends in I shared in an old house on Kings Highway. While they were at their real jobs, I sat there scrapping together placemats and coasters from the old pages of yellowed books I’d found at Uncommon Market on Fairmont Street or at a bookshop in Munich, and bits of fabric taken from my grandmother’s old dresses. Scraps of paper, ribbon, and fabric would litter the floor as I frantically tried to craft out my way in the world, and I’d scramble to tidy up before my fastidious roommates returned home during the witching hour.

While little came of LoftCraft, save a brief Twitter-sized mention in a magazine somewhere and scads of vintage scraps shoved in drawers, the effort of it unfolded Dallas to me in a way that was quite unexpected: I discovered Dallas had a history being told in the piles of things in vintage shops. Now, I know I’m not breaking news here, and that my little revelation may seem obvious, but it was a real moment. In college I spent my time defending Dallas to classmates who never ventured very far from the Gingerman’s wooden benches and were not convinced of a place that wasn’t replete with cobblestones and hot dog vendors. Slammed with the double whammy of being both history-less and un-urban, Dallas sat quietly seething in my mind, waiting to prove itself as neither.

When my friend and I were shooting photos of our wares one afternoon in the Bishop Arts District, the ladies from Zola’s Vintage pulled us into their shop to check out our stuff. Within minutes they had us in the back room digging through bags and boxes of things they’d found when treasure hunting in Dallas’ estate sales and yard sales: jars of buttons, hankies, garters, broken necklaces, ties and pins and doodads and whatnots aplenty. It was a bonified treasure trove of artifacts, and much of it was ours for the taking, provided we’d sell things in their shop.

Some of the things they gave us had the particular disability of being too loved and worn-out to salvage, like an embroidered child’s pillowcase showing two rabbits peeking out over a hill. It was stained and eaten by moths, and had the odd feeling of something that knows it’s been lost. It hangs in my own kids’ room now, never quite being suited, as it was, for any other function than to be looked at. Much of what they gave us ran the same course and has been relegated to jars. Some of the bits of odd jewelry and buttons hang on a wall in our house called “The Artifact Wall” where we hang just such things — the tossed-away or broken detritus of everyday life – in whimsical assemblages.

But there is a thing that the Zola’s ladies gave us that I keep with a certain air of gratitude and wonder. It’s an old black photo album with construction paper pages, a leather cover and shoestring binding, and it’s filled with pictures of folks dressed in 1920’s garb standing on their front porches, in their yards or at store fronts. All the houses in these pictures are the houses in the neighborhood where I’ve lived for a dozen years – squat bungalows and tall, deep Craftsman. Set on bare lots, except for the promise of a few young sycamores or oaks, these houses march down the street in orderly procession, one almost like the other, like so many cookie cutter newbies we love to loathe. But these scenes are changed entirely by the site of a little girl donning her Halloween costume on the steps of her wide porch, or a mother and toddler smiling in front of a patch of cantalilies or sitting on the stoop in the glaring sun. In one, three kids stand across the street from a house being constructed, the wood planks stacked sloppily, the house still just a skeleton. In many of the photos, young couples pose ironically, totally aware of the hilarious novelty of having one’s picture taken. The men wear their pants waist-high, with round-toed boots and flat straw hats. Girls pose in silky flapper dresses or Peter Pan-collared ones, accented with long, beaded necklaces. They have fitted hats and clever wavy bobs that tell of the dawning of a certain kind of sassy.

It’s an odd feeling, an eerily lovable one, to look at people, long dead, on the steps of houses I pass by everyday. Odder still, is seeing these neighborhoods pictured when they were still laced with sawdust, when columns sat perfectly level, and everyone congregated on shady porches to keep cool; when roads were gravel, cars had virtual bike wheels, and everything seemed dusty and hot.

Looking at these pictures is a lesson in how long it takes a tree to grow, a sidewalk to crack, a porch to bow, or wood to rot, and I begin to forgive a little the slant in a floor or the inability of certain doors to close. This photos subsequently taught me a great deal about how long it takes for neighborhoods to grow into themselves and age with grace, or otherwise. This neighborhood of mine across the river must have felt like a suburb to the city, and indeed understood itself as such, but time has filled in the gaps between here and there, and something now understood as urban was built to be decidedly not. In a few short generations, Dallas has sutured its dangling parts together, and what ever the urban nay-sayers speak, that to me is the testament to a healthy, historical place. These pictures were my personal tutorial in time’s slow creep and a city’s growth along side it.