Sarah Cherry, Age 12
The building outline is Stonybrook Variety, a mom-and-pop country store directly across the street from one of the houses I lived in, in Sabattus, ME. The Grays owned the store and would let me select penny candy every now and then. The store was also a tagging station and so I grew up with deer hanging from the eaves. It was a background to my playing and I have no judgment about this: it’s just part of rural life.
But I do think often about the ways innocence, necessity, and brutality abut each other in nature, how present that triangulation was in my childhood, and how it affects my outlook and orientation toward life now. Thinking about this in relation to the store and the dead animals that I would literally walk through reminded me of Sarah Cherry.
In July 1989 Sarah went missing in Bowdoin, Maine. I lived on Bowdoinham Road, on the backside of forest that separated my house from the house she was babysitting at when she disappeared.
Within 24 hours, Sarah Cherry was found in the woods, raped and murdered by strangulation. Not too long after, Dennis Dechaine was arrested. I remember seeing photos of him on the news and being terrified. I spent endless hours exploring the woods and fields. How tenuous the line between complete safety and death is in some places in the world! Maybe all places, ultimately.
When I was making this, I asked my mom if she remembered this and it turns out she actually knew this family and Sarah herself— they would come into the credit union where she was a teller.
The building outline is Stonybrook Variety, a mom-and-pop country store directly across the street from one of the houses I lived in, in Sabattus, ME. The Grays owned the store and would let me select penny candy every now and then. The store was also a tagging station and so I grew up with deer hanging from the eaves. It was a background to my playing and I have no judgment about this: it’s just part of rural life.
But I do think often about the ways innocence, necessity, and brutality abut each other in nature, how present that triangulation was in my childhood, and how it affects my outlook and orientation toward life now. Thinking about this in relation to the store and the dead animals that I would literally walk through reminded me of Sarah Cherry.
In July 1989 Sarah went missing in Bowdoin, Maine. I lived on Bowdoinham Road, on the backside of forest that separated my house from the house she was babysitting at when she disappeared.
Within 24 hours, Sarah Cherry was found in the woods, raped and murdered by strangulation. Not too long after, Dennis Dechaine was arrested. I remember seeing photos of him on the news and being terrified. I spent endless hours exploring the woods and fields. How tenuous the line between complete safety and death is in some places in the world! Maybe all places, ultimately.
When I was making this, I asked my mom if she remembered this and it turns out she actually knew this family and Sarah herself— they would come into the credit union where she was a teller.