Sunday, 15 June 2003 | Raleigh

Lemonade; the smell of fresh-cut grass; cookouts; driving on empty roads with the windows down; waving strangers; shopping for old records; afternoon thunderstorms; sweet tea and biscuits; old friends; riding bikes through neighborhoods of old houses and big lawns; mashed potatoes; dense forests; thrift stores full of bizarre and amusing kitsch; driving past fields full of tobacco, cows; local bands; beer and spiders on the porch; hot attics full of the past;

watching super 8 videos. Not only videos that I helped make, but surprise videos from the flea market, videos of other people and animals and places from long ago. We guessed the decade by the clothing: the hair, the eyeglasses, the polyester. They were films of families on Christmas morning, on vacation in Mexico, at birthday parties. Someone liked shooting film of sea lions, dogs and squirrels. There was one spooky video of a grave plot interspersed with footage of an old house in different seasons. Footage of Cape Canaveral in the 50s. Of a family building a dog house.

The projector noisily blows air and clicks by as it produces a jumpy, silent picture, one that seems more consistent with the silence of memories than modern video technology does. We play music as we watch, choosing impossibly recent soundtracks to match the surreal images onscreen. I'm addicted. I want to document everything this way.

I don't miss North Carolina often, but I love visiting, and I easily sink back in life here as if I never left, as if I'm on the other side of a barely perceptible skip in a record. It's hot and humid, just like it was last summer, and the summer before that.