I have been visiting a family ski house in southern Vermont with my partner since 2012. The cabin doesn’t belong to my family, but to his. Nothing in this house changed much until a few years back, when a nasty flood necessitated significant renovations. Yet much about the place remains the same as it was when I first visited. Its wood walls hold family history going back to the '80s when my partner's grandfather first purchased the cabin. Ski jackets from that time still line the upstairs closets. Ibuprofen from the late ‘90s sits untouched in the medicine cabinet. A distinct aroma of old wood, decaying leaves, and generations of dog hair pervades the air.

My partner and I were apart for several years between our college years and our present relationship. We've changed in significant ways during that time. So has the house. Old and new are spliced together into something almost resembling continuity. As I navigate the life we are slowly building together, I am both insider and outsider to his family. The ski house and the picturesque Vermont town it inhabits feel like home, and yet these spaces contain many layers of memories foreign to me. Pictures reveal people I will never meet. I am a thread entering a much larger weave. My camera offers an intimate way of learning this place—and family—through the act of image-making.

I study objects and surfaces as if they are an organism. My partner flits in and out of the frame. The camera freezes candid, mundane gesture, transforming it in a process of familial mythmaking. Even as I scrutinize my surroundings in an attempt to know them as my own, I am writing a new story of kinship, knitting threads together. I become part of—and thereby change—a history I've never known.