beth gilmore

a deeply moving adventure to see the place my grandparents lived in the 1920s above their drugstore.. I am cold and shaking and excited, I feel a bit dizzy. The adventure to see the apartment above my grandparent’s drugstore where they lived was exhilarating. Dangerous and dirty, beauty under debris. I am captivated. My photos are inadequate. I crave more. It was tremendous. Their dust is on my clothes and me. The dimly lit photos taken as large as files would permit. There nature feels to me like that of the experience of trying to see the past, trying to know it, it cannot really be known, although we can find bits of things, shiny and not. The feeling of that time, any past time eludes us. Though we want it so badly. This nostalgia, an illness they use to call it. An affliction for sure, a haunted need that will go truly unfilled. It is something that has been much studied then and then and then and now and will be. To touch time that is gone by is an ill wish. And it’s not really about that at all. What it is about is something more profound. Looking for something that is real, but better than our real. Things must have been better? No things where not better, some things where different and some were the same. And you can stand in the room where they happened and still not be there. I don't know what else to say. I can't find the words, like my camera can't find enough light to illuminate well what little is left.