Old pictures of my family or of my home town are like small, clouded windows into the past. I want to wipe away the fog that has turned the picture black and white. I want to peer at them from a sharp angle in the hopes of seeing something that’s just out of the frame. I want to squeeze through and walk past my stiffly posed ancestors and into the house that I was born in as it was a hundred years ago or more. There is a picture of my hometown, Chateaugay New York, looking North out of the center of town. It is the 1870s. My family’s farm is straight down the road that leads North out of town, or up to the top of the picture. I know they’re there, frozen in their tracks, caught in one moment of their day, but they’re three miles away. But it’s so close. I know that intersection. I know that road. Why can’t I just break the glass and crawl through the window into that sepia tinted world, and walk North on that muddy road to meet my great-great grandparents?