The floor is actually a great workspace

Eight in the morning on a Sunday and I am sitting in the middle of my living room floor surrounded by archival boxes like I am the main character of a documentary about a person who has too many feelings about other people’s family photographs. This is fine. This is the project.

The floor is actually a great workspace

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what Margaret said during our last tea session — that the hardest part of preservation work isn’t the materials, it’s deciding what a thing means before you decide where it lives. She said it about her late husband’s collection, but I keep turning it over in my head as I try to figure out how to organize three families’ worth of stories alongside my own. The Vasquez archive felt manageable when it was just mine. Now I’m two weeks into coordinating with the contacts she gave me, and I’m learning that every family has its own internal logic, its own gaps, its own contradictions that took decades to calcify. You can’t just impose a system. You have to listen to the materials first.

He said he was just grabbing coffee. The camera tells a different story.

The chaos on my floor this morning is actually progress — I reorganized the whole documentation station to create separate working sections for each family thread, so I stop accidentally conflating things that don’t belong together. It looks like a disaster. It is, functionally, the most organized I’ve been on this project. I told Jake that and he just took a picture. Which tracks. Anyway — Father’s Day weekend, quiet apartment, archival boxes, and somewhere in this pile is a photograph that might answer a question one family has been asking for thirty years. That’s the thing that keeps me on the floor at eight on a Sunday. The possibility that the answer is already here and I just haven’t reached it yet.