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Back in 2019, my aunt asked me to housesit for her while she went on a trip for a couple weeks. My aunt has always been one of my heroes, a movie buff, historian, our family’s genealogist/detective, and an exquisite fun-loving storyteller.

I can recall three distinct houses she’s lived in throughout my life, each one surpassing the last as my favorite place on earth. They’ve all possessed a ‘spooky daylight’ quality; they feel old, remote, and this particular property I was housesitting generally feels like someplace ripped out of The Innocents (1961).

Every morning at the crack of dawn I’d let her three dogs out, go tend to the horses, check on the peacocks. Then I’d made a huge pot of coffee and work on the feature version of this story. One day while raiding her pantry I came across an off brand of something called ‘Member’s Mark,” and was immediately transported back to this photo of me as a kid where I had a red mark in the middle of my palm from having touched one of my parents’ cigarettes.

My life in the Midwest feels like a totally foreign time now, but growing up I had a deep urgency in me to leave, like I’d be electing to stand in quicksand if I didn’t. I’m not sure what fate I was running from, but I am lovingly haunted by the version of me that might exist had I stayed.

A huge driving factor of my exit was the tumultuous severe weather. A hot stormy morning could quickly yield a chilly afternoon of light snow, a repressive dour gray day could stretch for several months; the weather there is a yo-yo and the underlying subject of most conversations.

The weather has always been fascinating to me, and paired with an early normalized interest in family history, I felt compelled to make this as some kind of family heirloom. New family secrets were unlocked, and new pieces of the map literally appeared when my aunt pointed out things such as an unmarked cemetery that had always been there just hidden from the road.

Anyways, moral of the story is we’re infinite. This film is me depicting what might transpire if we keep manipulating time, space, and in turn the weather; creating an out of sync temporal dissonance that forces us to meet people/selves we shouldn’t. I’m not sure I’ll make anything quite like this again.