Natalie Nelson

Our generation gap is a flight of stairs I was scrounging for food in my parents? kitchen when my mother popped her head over the refrigerator door. She said she had a surprise.
Guiding me into the living room, she pointed at a stack of hand-labeled discs and explained that after a decade of letting the VHS-to-DVD converter accumulate dust, my father had transferred all of our family video footage. Ignoring my mumbled comments about the modern revolution of digital storage, she popped in the first video and dimmed the lights.
Hours flew by as we binge-watched home movies, and on the train home that night, the film reel of my family history replayed in my head. I realized two things.
One, that my dear parents have no idea how to operate a video camera. And two, that through the many hours of severely overexposed or maddeningly underexposed tape, the setting was almost always the same: Nearly every holiday and gathering and document-worthy moment took place in the upstairs or downstairs of my parents? house. Or, if you arrived at the door in the 1970s, my grandparents? house. Or, if you were visiting in the 1940s, my great-grandparents? house. The same house that has been in my family for 72 years.
Containing two apartments stacked on top of each other, this unassuming semi-detached home is located in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. The neighborhood is quiet and picturesque, with the bay on one side and the beach on the other. The air always runs a bit ...