As we prepare to depart for Chicago – with no set departure date and a very loose method of action – I spend more and more time closed up in my room, looking through old papers and pasting drawings and magazine cutouts into a notebook. Looking through old cutouts I have no memory of what possessed me in the moment to remove some of them from the pages of glossy Vogues or the New York Times Fashion Magazine. Some of them make sense, others do not. Some are haunting – old photographs of New Orleans prostitutes blinking in worn forms, white undergarments and black tights, their eyes showing a modern sensibility despite the Victorian hairstyles. Here are women who know too much.
The article was about how they inspired a particular artist back then and how now they inspire "not-so-innocent" white-dress fashion.
Thinking about this, I pull out an old photo album that my mother picked up at a tag sale. I consider the curious old pictures in the graying midday light. A storm is approaching and I have things to do before the rain comes. Storms approach often of late, and I find myself interested in the rain more than I usually am – my father complains of washouts and my mother enjoys the thunder – but I, in the flutters of youth, can’t seem to sit still enough to fully appreciate the destruction or beauty of the rain. I look to the past to sit still for a minute. A past I have no connection to.
The article was about how they inspired a particular artist back then and how now they inspire "not-so-innocent" white-dress fashion.
Thinking about this, I pull out an old photo album that my mother picked up at a tag sale. I consider the curious old pictures in the graying midday light. A storm is approaching and I have things to do before the rain comes. Storms approach often of late, and I find myself interested in the rain more than I usually am – my father complains of washouts and my mother enjoys the thunder – but I, in the flutters of youth, can’t seem to sit still enough to fully appreciate the destruction or beauty of the rain. I look to the past to sit still for a minute. A past I have no connection to.
There’s a photograph of herding sheep – an old house – rooms in an old house – a falling mill – Uncle Jay, Mother, and Aunt Carrie in Southbury, CT. – mice in a cage next to a picture of a cat – a beaver – a vacation to the Saint Lawrence River. I wonder if the person who put this together was a photographer, amateur or otherwise, trying to capture a story or poem with each lens. The pictures are certainly strange enough, designed enough. Of course, having sheep of my own, I go back to the sheep, take it aside, and think how it reminds me of old pictures from England hidden away in my British grandmother’s Connecticut living room. 
What is it that makes old photographs ghostly? The style and technology of the photography itself, or the fact that most of the things in these photographs are long since gone?
As it begins to rain I run downstairs to take the laundry off the line and notice my parents sitting on the back deck under the canvas umbrella, pulling elderberries off the stems and putting them in freezer bags for my father’s elderberry wine. They don’t leave even as it starts to rain, and I still hear them out there as it begins to pour. I should be there with them, learning to listen and not captured by someone else’s ghostly memories.
