About

"Are you ready to step back in time?" I ask Greg as we make our way up the stairs and toward the back room. Dusty curtains with a seventies orange and brown motif push aside to reveal the old living room in a somewhat disturbing, half-lived in state. Well-worn blanket covers are falling off the chairs and sofa. Cardboard boxes and piles of records, I think some are 8 tracks--but I can't say for  sure, are those what you call the small ones?--sit on the floor by the windows, clearly the half-finished sorting job of a previous visitor, likely my uncle. His guitar is on a stand in the corner, one of three obvious and anachronistic touches of modernity, along with an original iMac, the hulking round bubble style that is well past it's prime and the television set with the external DVD player, though to complete the picture both are propped on a much older edition, with a wooden box casing.

This is my grandmother's (and, until several years back, grandfather's) house. 

It is a place that is more suspended, untouched by time, in my memory than it is in the scene in front of me. The weeks I spent as a child shape the way I picture it, less dilapidated and more quaint. 

But the passage of so many years and the static nature of the place has also turned it into a time capsule for the lives of two on the grand scale ordinary, but in a personal sense extraordinary, individuals, as well as the ones that came before and after. It's personal flotsam and jetsam, photos, papers, scraps of life that's likely of little consequence to he "outside" world, but a familial treasure trove. Yet this treasure is messy, bulky, not something that can be shouldered indefinitely by those of us who will have to decide which of this and that is carried forward for our future generations.

From this knowledge, and from the few "discoveries" I made over a brief visit, I decided to start a "new" grandmother's house, which wouldn't clutter anyone's closets nor let the stories fade away. 

At first, it's going to be just about collection -- finding the who and what and when of the family, and getting as much information from across the internet into one place as possible, and hopefully throwing it into some kind of usable framework. Then I hope to go back and digitize more of the archives at grandmother's, to add photos and flesh out details. In the end, it may evolve into a narrative, linking together the information that I can collect, but at this stage it's early catalog mode.