Over 60 years ago my parents bought the first and only home they'd ever own. My sister and I grew up there and at nearly age 100 my mother is still living there.
The early years of my parents' lives-as German Jews, survivors, and refugees-left a mark on their home just as great as the mark left by the years that my sister and I lived there with them. With the death of my father and the fading of my mother's memory, their past is moving more into the shadows, leaving fewer traces in the light.
Over the last few years, during my visits to my mother on the South Jersey shore, I've been recording details of a place that, for me, is haunted by the past. But those echoes resound in a space that is still inhabited by my mother and her aides. Few concrete mementos of my parents' lives before they came to the U.S. remain. Perhaps that helps to explain why they seem to have held on to everything they acquired afterward.
Traces is a work in progress.
