SHOWING MY HOUSE
I had an inquiry today from someone connected to Warren Wilson who was interested in considering buying my house. Since I wasn’t able to show him the house, being thousands of miles away, he wanted to see photographs of the interior. You can tell that I don’t think like a realtor. It had never occurred to me to send a message to the Warren Wilson community that my house was for sale and then to fly away to Germany with no way to show them the interior. It never occurred to me to take photos of the empty house so I have none. But when I asked Apple search of my thousands of photographs to show me photographs of my living room or kitchen they instantly appeared along with every living room or kitchen I had ever photographed. It would have taken me hours and hours to have located these photographs by searching through my thousands of photographs stored in the Apple cloud. This is artificial intelligence at work, which smart people everywhere are so afraid of. It seems miraculous that I can enter a word, kitchen, and not only does a computer somewhere understand what I mean by the word kitchen (in English and probably 50 other languages) but is able to identify what makes a kitchen a kitchen rather than some other room, say a living room or a bathroom. The sink is in some photos, the refrigerator in others and neither one in others. I am gobsmacked.
But in addition I am suddenly very nostalgic. This is the house that Kathe and I lived in for 30 years and is filled with with the colorful things that gave us delight, all of them now stripped away. So I am including the photographs here so that I can easily find them again and can remind anyone who was ever in our house who happens to read this what it was like.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 