Last night we went to my grandmother's house, the one on my father's side, which lives somewhere in the mountains where I'd spent the summer taking photos with my cousin. The path is only passable on foot, and so we set off in total darkness as the rain-splashed sky wept wet spears over our bowed heads. Like many houses built at the time, it's a place that's been overtaken by modern life, and basically nothing has really changed since the last time I was there as a kid. The same dishes on the same plates, the same grape juice in the same glasses, the same furniture, the same enormous brown-brushed floor. It's as if everything is frozen in time, and apart from the TV in the background showing Attention à la marche, nothing has changed since that photo of me at six years old that hangs on the wall. My grandmother's memory has been failing for some years now, due to Alzheimer's disease. Her husband and two sons visit her regularly to take care of her, but at this stage she has no notion of the passage of time, when she should eat - who the people sitting around her at the table are, how old they are, what their names are. We shared some of the usual Christmas dishes - gratin, roast venison, foie gras. It was really nice to see everyone again, and living far away in the azure hues of Nice, I forget those childhood days spent playing in my grandmother's barn or hurtling down the snow-covered plains on my little red sled. I find it really hard to describe my childhood because I always feel that there are so many details to mention that if I forget one, the rest will seem out of context, so I prefer to stop there rather than elaborate. By the time I got to the top my camera battery was dead, so I scratched out a few images here and there when, after a while off, my Canon would let me take a picture or two. I found it extremely difficult to capture anything in the dim light of the ceiling light alone, but in retrospect I think it's the blur and grain that best capture my state of mind that evening. It no longer mattered who I was miles down the road, here in this precise spot with these precise people I simply felt like a kid again, lost in the haze of my own memory.