I wander into the living room with my seventh cookie as Mom pops a tape into the VHS player. “What’s that?” Ichabod asks.

“A videocassette tape,” Dad tells him. “It’s like a DVD.”

Avenue folds up a used Band-Aid and flicks it at Ichabod’s ear. “What’s a DVD?”

“It’s Netflix for old people,” Domino replies, as I feel my ancient, brittle bones dissolve.

“When your parents were little,” Mom explains gently to her grandchildren, “we would record them on the camcorder.” Thankfully, there are no tapes here memorializing me as an awkward teenager, as Grandma only has the old videocassettes.

On the screen, a much younger Hughes family is at a campground, but my working memory of this trip is obsolete. Mom’s voice is overly loud, which my off-camera father remarks on. “Oh, shush,” Present-Day Mom says in unison with her younger self. “I have to talk loud, or the sound won’t pick up!”

“Listen to Dad!” Kaia laughs. “Your accent was so much stronger!”

Dad glowers. “I sound the same.”

The camcorder pivots, capturing Dad in his full thirtysomething glory: spiky brown hair, a blue sweater with artistic holes around the collar, svelte.

“Who’s that?” Minnesota Moon asks, and Dad hollers.

“What do you mean, who’s that? That’s me.”

She looks him up and down. “Doesn’t look like you.”

He points at her. “Watch your mouth.”

“You know, sometimes I forget how he landed you,” Grandma remarks to her daughter. “I remember now. Although I still say you got married too young.”

“You married young, too.”

“We can’t all be the exception to marriage statistics, darling.”

We all scream when we’re blessed with Great-Grandma (rest her soul) in culottes and a fanny pack. She shields her face from the camera, pushing Mom away, who films a chubby-cheeked Kaia waddling around in a diaper. Little Athena is unrecognizable with her brown ponytail. In the distance, Grandpa is fishing at the edge of a lake. Felix stands next to him, shirtless and deeply suntanned, his scraggly mullet sun-brightened nearly to blond. His kids immediately yowl in reaction to his hair.

“It was the style,” he and Mom both insist.

“Where’s little Bettie?” Grandpa (present-day) asks, five seconds before (younger) Dad asks the same question.

“She’s in time-out,” we all hear Mom respond. She turns and zooms in on a scowling little creature in a blue bucket hat and pink jellies, wispy black hair in pigtails. Little Bettie is bouncing on a metal and plastic lawn chair, kicking up rocks. The screen goes black for a few seconds; when the video flickers back on, we’re no longer at the campground.

“Ooooh, look at this!” Young Mom exclaims, very loudly, shaking a rattle in Kaia’s face. “Look at this!” She shoves a baby doll in Kaia’s face. Kaia presses her small hand into the cake that is presented to her and watches it ooze between her fingers in fascination.

“Grandma, are you smoking?” Honeysuckle Lou exclaims.

“That’s a candy cigarette.”

“There’s smoke coming out of it.”