Mother carefully pours a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. “I know how old she is,” she says.

We finish our coffee in silence. Outside, birds flit hither and yon in the naked trees and chirp their disinterest in human affairs. I observe my mother carefully. She looks small, plucked clean.

A girl in an old-fashioned dress dusts the little-used dining room. She hums to herself a heartful tune, but her eyes are sad. Whatever dust there is now on the china cabinet remains. I think I recognize her, but it’s too late to place who it is. She is gone before the tune fully dissipates.

My grandmother now stands there, holding a glass and gazing into its depths with profound concentration as if willing it to reveal the secrets of life.

The past is everywhere, here, wrapped up in the present.

It is the past that intrigues me; I am afflicted with an obsession for history. Teaching archaeology allows me to slide easily into the past until I find myself missing it achingly, feeling a kind of nostalgia for a time before I was born. I feel almost as though I can touch an artifact from the past and transport myself there, which is why I collect small tokens from around the house that feel imbued with meaning or history, or both. It isn’t, after all, as if time is quite as fixed as everyone else would have you believe. At least, not here it isn’t.

I would very much like to go on an official archaeological dig in the swamp, if I could get the funding. I could be the foremost expert on the secret communities that used to live there, reading into a tiny bit of polished stone all manner of tools and meals it helped create. But for now I focus on sharing this peculiar joy with my students: enjoying the slow easy lull of old documents with their baroque prose that implies no one is in any hurry to get anywhere but to the next lovely phrase, the look on students’ faces when they begin to understand the subjectivity of the past, of reality itself, of how stories create our reality. But I wonder: is the house an objective source? Are the memories here perfect reconstructions of reality, or are they filtered through the house’s perception the way all memories are filtered through our brains, the way I am reconstructing this story for you?

So how can I find out who the boy was, if I can’t trust my own eyes?

I fear what it must be like to forget the past, like my grandparents. My mother’s parents were both plagued with early-onset dementia. In a house that constantly relives what came before, they must have seen versions of themselves doing things they could no longer recall, strange beings wearing their own flesh. Darling, did we argue on the night of our twentieth anniversary? Did I make you sleep on the couch? Let’s watch and find out. Make some popcorn. Even the smaller gestures—putting away dishes in a certain order, a moment of indecision in the library with a hand hovering over the spines of potential books, a sharp word on a gloomy evening—must have seemed so poignantly foreign that they questioned whether or not they knew themselves at all. Imagine that life. Familiarity become unfamiliar.