“Maybe it’s true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I take walks down my street, smell the post-rain sweetness of the sycamore, and I remember my grandfather, now passed, and the same smell that followed us years ago, on different walks in a different place. He is gone. They are gone. I am left to reconstruct histories from fragments of lives lived separate from my own. I collect what remains (photographs) to develop stories left untold. Mine are a mythical people, strong yet vulnerable, stubborn and beaten, yet rising—a people in which life is always growing among dead things.