My grandma returns, bringing with her a pale pink nightgown (what used to be one of her blouses) which she kept in the linen closet, next to the other peach towels, in a special bag to protect it from dust. This was my nightgown: mid-thigh, soft cotton, butterfly-embroidered neckline. She has me hold up my arms while she slips it over my head, drapes it over my body like air. She opens the top drawer beneath the sink and pulls out a boar bristle brush, runs it through my hair. I’ve never liked the brush because it only catches small sections and strands at a time, never strong enough to sweep through the full thickness of my hair–although later in life I will come to appreciate the value in this type of hair brush, the boar bristles distributing the hair’s natural oils. My grandma must have known this, working patiently with the brush to pull my strands straight and shiny. She had forgiven me, and I know this now as I knew it then, watching our faces in the mirror as she ran the brush through my hair, the nightgown breathing comfortably against my body.

When I was very young, my grandma gave me a doll. Her name was Linda, and she used to be my mother’s. She even had her own tiny boar-bristle brush, but her hair was awful, cut so short in brittle blond curls on her head that the brush only snagged it, or made it look worse. But I liked her anyway–the vacant blue eyes rolling back in her head, the movable plastic limbs with dented toes–and occasionally, I brushed her hair, the way my grandma carefully brushed my own. Linda had numerous knitted dresses and booties that my grandma had made, and I carried all of them, along with her brush, bottle, and hand mirror, in a portable beige trunk. Linda also had a cradle, which my grandpa had hand-cut, sanded, assembled, and painted white. It rocked smoothly and quietly; it had sheets and hand-painted flowers and oddly-placed stickers I’d pressed to the front and back. The cradle, Linda, and her trunk used to reside in the guest room at the end of the hall, which was often termed “my” room, given that guests were so few and far between, and that I often spent time in there with Linda, on the floor next to the bed and a simple bookshelf.

After a few years, however, Linda moved out of the guest room, which became populated with slippers, a closet full of shirts and slacks, and a bottle of Tums on the nightstand, the dark blue lid and chalky whiteness stark against the dim light. After that, the door at the end of the hallway was usually closed, a mirror reflecting what was outside, as if the room no longer existed. Now, it was my grandpa’s room.

I never asked them about it–why they stopped sleeping in the same bed, the same room. During the day, they were just as pleasant toward one another, no different than I had ever known them to be. Whatever love they had, subtle as it was, didn’t seem to change. They just simply drifted apart, as if it was a natural move, like two planets orbiting in different rotations, two creatures that had evolved from one lifestyle to the next. It never seemed easy to explain; not something I could find in the living room encyclopedias, like I could the evolution of man or the properties of Saturn. I knew only that love was a complicated thing, that it linked people together even when it pulled them apart; that it meant more than what we express in words.

I sleep next to my grandma in what is now her bed, pressing my hand into the memory foam pillow, watching the imprint fade in the moonlight. Linda lies in her cradle in the closet, the sliding door open so I can see her resting beneath the hanging shirts and dresses. On the dresser is a plastic container with a powder puff, and pink, baby powder-scented dust. In the morning I will ask to test it on my skin, and like always my grandma will let me, smiling–the way she always lets me look through the jewelry box on her nightstand, no matter how often I’ve seen the unused pearls and cocktail rings and gaudy clip-on earrings that look made for lonely women.

Her jewelry never leaves the box, and so I keep looking through it and trying it on, wanting to know more. But I never ask to borrow or keep it, knowing somehow that these things should be left alone. And anyway, she has given me enough.

My grandma comes into the room with a fresh cup of coffee–black–in a plain white mug. She sets it down in front of my grandpa as he thanks her politely, still focused on his game of Solitaire. I am sitting across from him at the dining room table, swiveling my chair, digging my small fingernails into the white leather armrest seams, fidgeting as I watch him play. The cards are laid out in five columns of five cards each, red and black, red and black. He works carefully, his thick reading glasses titillating on his nose, his eyes shifting left, then right, then left again. He makes the occasional grunt or thoughtful sigh, then turns over another card, adds it to his pile, then another, then another. Occasionally, I quietly point to one, assisting in my own small way. After a few minutes, he is out of moves.

He sets down his stack, stares at the spread in front of him.

“Nope!” he says. He lifts his eyes to mine. “Not this time.”

I crack a grin, then watch as he sweeps his hand across the cards, gathers them quickly, shuffles, and deals them again.

Grandpa plays Solitaire over and over until he grows bored, needs a smoke, or it’s time for dinner. Granny has her own distractions–puzzles, ten thousand pieces each, spread out over the length of a large plastic table under the living room window. When I visit, I sit on the couch and play with the Rubik’s Cube that always sits on the lamp table, trying to place my fingers on all the scattered matching colors, as if I can will them to assemble. Of course I can’t, but it’s all I know to do with it.

I am bored. I empty a plastic container of dice on the carpet, examining the clear red die and the small wooden die and the other distinct little cubes before remembering I have no traditional, practical, or entertaining use for any of them. So I invent my own games: stack them like bricks in a tiny house, arrange them into shapes or number patterns, pick up a handful and shower them down on the rest like the skies are plummeting and listen to the tiny knocking, clacking collisions.

There are times, however, when the three of us play together. Times when the shuffling of cards means Crazy Eights and the clacks are those of Aggravation marbles or wooden Crokinole discs. The games are always traditional or ancient, boxes yellowing on closet shelves. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the thud of the card deck on the table; the metallic shuffle of pennies, cold and copper-scented in an old coffee tin when we scoop them out to play Ten Penny. My grandma’s soft and sweet laughter, my grandpa’s bellow at the end of a hand. The bittersweet wait for something to put an end to the quiet, the empty smile of silence.

Grandpa riffles the card deck, taps it straight on the table, slides it into the box. He turns on the television, forgets his losing streak, his one sweet joy–one win in dozens of losses–already days behind him.

Eventually I will learn to play Solitaire alongside him at the table, each of us with our own set of cards. We will sit in a mutual quiet, a shared independence, amid spades and hearts and the stately frowns of monarchs–our flips and shuffles and occasional mumbles the only breaks in the silence. The difference between us is that I play with only four columns, rather than five–my child’s mind still far too impatient, too eager for joy.

My grandma answers the back door in her housecoat, pink foam curlers in her grey-brown curls, somewhat undone from sleep. She is awake, but is missing her usual dark pink lipstick and mascara, though still smiling–her dentures white and almost gleaming.

“Good morning,” she beams, ushering me and my mom inside. I am eight and we are here for a quick visit before school to drop off the mail, which my mom let me pull from my grandparents’ shiny metal post office box, for which we have a spare key. I set the stack of envelopes and fliers on the kitchen table’s crocheted tablecloth, next to a basket of peaches and a vase of plastic roses. I stand shy in my sneakers on the scratchy green mat by the door as my grandpa steps slowly into the room.

“Hello!” he yells in his low, enthusiastic voice, feet shuffling in the slippers my mom gave him for Christmas. My grandpa still retains a number of handsome features from photos of earlier years: short dark hair–despite graying–with a slight high curl in front, eyes like stones, strong jawline, broad shoulders, surprising warm smile. As usual, he wears a cardigan and trousers.

My grandparents have always been quiet, but pleasant. Always smiling, always friendly, but reserved. Raised Mennonite and Catholic, they came from big families (ten to thirteen kids) but you’d never know it–visitors were scarce, with brothers and sisters (my mother’s aunts and uncles) arriving occasionally, just as foreign to me each time I met them, regardless of how many occasions there had been. They led simple lives; despite their upbringing they didn’t go to church, nor farm (though my grandma kept a garden)–they had never even learned to drive.
Their lack of a vehicle wasn’t really a problem, as they usually only left the house when they needed to, and if they needed a ride, my mom was always there. Before they retired, they walked to their nearby jobs (Fort St. James is fairly small)–my grandma a night janitor at my elementary school, and my grandpa working at the historic park and later at the Fort St. James Hotel. On rare occasions they visited my family (a block away)–although usually, we visited them. They would sometimes walk to the doctor’s office and the grocery store, and every once in a while they’d take me and my brother out for Chinese food and burgers. They usually only left town for medical reasons.

Today, they are staying in. My mom and I are in a hurry, so we stand by the door and keep our shoes on while they hug me and ask me about school. When it is time to go, I tug the doorknob–the back door sticking like a refrigerator door–and step out onto the back porch, triumphant for having conquered the exit. When we back down the hill and out of the driveway, my grandma holds open the living room curtain and waves until we disappear down the street, and I wave back and watch until I see the curtain swishing in her wake.

Everything about it is yellow: the bright formica counter tops, the floral wallpaper, the cupboards, the gauzy curtains, the aging refrigerator. It reeks of the sixties, when my mother was still a child, when it was still common to have a bright yellow kitchen. But at nine years old, I know nothing of that decade–only that I am here now, that this kitchen is bright as sunshine and butter, that it will surely always be this way.

I close the back door and set an old ice cream bucket full of raspberries on the yellow counter top. They are from the backyard bush, and are my favorite: some as large as my big toe, ripe, reddish-purple like bruises. I kick off my shoes and take in the yellow around me, my colored pencil drawings of foxes and sunsets magneted to the refrigerator and back door. My grandma comes into the room in her pink knit sweater, marvels at the fullness of the bucket. We wash the raspberries in a spaghetti strainer, then partition most of them into old cottage cheese containers to mark and place in a corner of the basement freezer. A small handful, though, are tumbled into a small white china bowl, then mixed with milk and three tablespoons of sugar. The result is a thick pink mixture, raspberries still huddling whole in the center: something I probably couldn’t turn down if my life depended on it.

My grandma’s kitchen was a lab for food. I’ll never know what she did in there to produce such wonderful concoctions–whether it was truly science or if fairies blessed the treats and meals with colorful dust. All I knew was sitting at the dining room table or on the living room sofa while she brought me snacks–sometimes without even asking if I wanted anything, or what, as if she knew intuitively when and what to bring me. I loved all of it: rainbow ice cream (white, pink and minty green) in sturdy, ornate wine glasses, cheddar cheese with crackers and salami, bags of pre-shelled sunflower seeds and barbecue peanuts, carrots from her garden with dill-flavored dip, the world’s sweetest pickled beets, homemade donuts, and of course, raspberries with sugar and milk. Her signature drink was grape Kool-Aid, which she’d always bring to me in a plastic, rabbit-shaped cup with ears protruding from the lid, the sugar never quite dissolving at the bottom: a sweet purple sludge ready to be carefully poured onto my tongue once I’d finished the liquid.

Some nights, my grandma would invite me and my parents over for a roast beef dinner, which to this day is my favorite meal: the smoothest mashed potatoes, the most savory, salty beef roast, fresh vegetables, and beef gravy–which tasted even better when she burnt it. When we had sleepovers, she would sometimes make popcorn–the kernels rattling into an old-fashioned popcorn maker, white fluff spilling out the chute. And of course, she canned: mason jars full of pears and peaches she’d bring from some dark, magic place in the basement. Almost as good as the raspberries, that syrupy sweetness in her white china bowls, the clink of spoons against porcelain.

Once, when I was seven years old, she was making me breakfast while I sat at the dining room table, kicking my feet, fidgeting with my silverware, waiting. She always made breakfast the same, and she knew I loved it–bacon cooked just right, toast with the crusts cut off, an abundance of scrambled eggs. Years later I would adopt her technique, cooking the eggs straight from the shell in the bacon grease, yolk and whites still somewhat separate. It was beautiful, the way she would lay it all out: orange slices on the side, a glass of milk, the toast cut into buttery rectangles. Her smile.

This time, however, I was impatient. Maybe some of it was out of boredom, but I found myself mimicking some cartoon I’d seen: fork in one hand and butter knife in the other, pounding my fists on the table, chanting repeatedly for my food.

After a minute, my grandma had had quite enough. She came to the doorway, her face flushed, brown curls grazing her neck. With spatula in hand, she yelled, “It will just be a few more minutes! You will wait.”

I was silenced immediately. She retreated back to the stove, and I laid my fork and knife back down on my napkin, quietly, stunned and instantly regretting my behavior.

I admit, I was spoiled. It wasn’t something I asked for, but it was the truth–tingling on my taste buds. Those moments of tension between my grandma and me were a blip amidst all the good memories of that kitchen: the color, the smells of cooking, the drawings, the doilies, the milkmaid figurines atop the refrigerator. But I would never forget those moments–the pull from warmth and light to a place of cold and quiet, like the corner of a basement freezer, the dark red sting of anger.

When I’m away I miss that overgrown section of yard at the edge of the woods where lawn and field overlap. This is the place where hawks will circle near the treetops, where the pine and spruce form a dark green corner for the shadows and sunlight to mingle. The world is quiet here most days, the only movement the ripple of tall field grass when the wind brushes through, the way a hand will sweep the fur of a favorite pet. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I lived at home, I would visit that graveyard when I wanted quiet, when I wanted to be in a place where being was all that mattered or was. I’d sit or stand in front of those crosses at the bottom of the little hill with the mountain alder, its leafy frame small and strange beneath the needled trees. The crosses stood in a row–slender, haphazardly nailed branches and boards collected from the yard or shed–like wooden soldiers, weather-worn and later broken by heavy snow. At first there were only a couple, but they multiplied slowly over the years to three and four and maybe five. The graves themselves were small and covered with heavy stones from the rock pile behind the shed. After the digging and placing of stones and crosses, though, it was difficult to find the graves in the months and years of summer field overgrowth and forgetful snowmobiles snapping off the tops of crosses beneath the snow.

Still, I came to visit. Or just sit, and think, or wander around the hill and into the woods, weaving through the trees and looping back out again. Out here is where my cats, one by one, went missing–disappearing mysteriously, quietly, finally. All except for Jewel, the calico who still remembers me well on the rare occasions I visit. Both she and my dog, Missy, used to follow me out here, a patch of black hair on the dog’s back rising at the awareness of what might be lurking nearby–a possible bear, a moose, a coyote. She was always assuming the role of protector–even the time when the neighbor’s dogs chased one of our wandering rabbits back into the yard, and she snapped at the dogs instead of the rabbit, driving them home. Years later, though, they would trespass and kill one of the rabbits anyway, her limp body laid out beside the lawnmower, two feet from the rabbit hutch.

All the graves were filled with rabbits: rabbits who were prey, rabbits who were euthanized, rabbits who were killed after birth by their mothers. Rabbits who ate raspberries and celery, dug holes in the garden, braved the garden hose, the trampoline, the fishing net. One by one, when the time came, we placed them in plastic containers and shoe boxes lined with hay and hand towels, clover and grass clippings. We filled a rusted wheelbarrow with rocks, cobbled together our hand-made crosses, set shovel to soil, put them into the ground.

When my dog died, she didn’t go in the ground. She simply seemed to disappear, having been present for eleven years, after dying of cancer or some other disease no one noticed until she was days and then hours from the end. When I visit, I expect to see her sitting on the porch, still unable to process the fact that what’s left of Missy is actually deduced to two white, unlabeled cardboard boxes the size of Chinese takeout containers–filled with what I am told are her ashes and stashed behind the family photos on top of the china cabinet.

All these years, no one could think of a better place to put those boxes–or the ashes, or the bodies, for that matter.

What have you tried to repair? Ten minutes. Go.

For the first time, I tried to fix the vacuum cleaner. I have bad luck with these. I buy them at Walmart (yeah, I know) for $40-$80, the bagless ones with nice plastic locking canisters and hepa filters, blue or green, Daredevil or Bissell. I used to use them for six months to a year until they made strange noises, lost suction and failed to pick up lint and crumbs and paperclips, ceased to scare me when the end of the hose came in contact with a plastic bag, a rug, my pant leg. When this happened (when nothing happened) I’d stare at them, kick them a couple of times, then haul them back to Walmart (no receipt necessary) for a free replacement. Most times, I’d walk out with the exact same vacuum cleaner, and when it died in five months this time, I’d try a different one, and keep moving through variants, until I had gone through five vacuum cleaners in four years.

I used to put them together myself–take out all the parts, find a screwdriver (one of the only tools I kept on hand) and snap and twist everything together until it was a workable machine, a hungry electric beast. Not that this part was difficult–I’m an instructions kind of gal (that is until I’ve put together so many vacuum cleaners that it becomes basic instinct, or reflex). But it never occurred to me to take one apart, to mess with the bits that came pre-assembled, to attempt anything that wasn’t on paper.

When I moved out of my last apartment, my dad shook the vacuum cleaner, attacked the hose with a fork, pulled out clumps of dirt and lint held together with long strands of hay. And it made sense. Ahh, of course–the stuff my chinchillas eat, criss-crossing inside the hose. It’s as if hay is perfect for nesting. Or something.

On our way out of town I took the vacuum back to Walmart despite its renovated state, hoping to claim problems regardless so that I could get the dollar amount on a gift card as usual and buy a new machine when I moved to Pittsburgh, instead of shipping this one. But alas, return policies are subject to change–exchanges within three months with a receipt. So with no other option, and no chance for a refund, I left a perfectly good vacuum cleaner sitting at Walmart as we drove out of dusty Idaho.

Now I’m on the floor, six months later, facing the same problem, even though I won’t vacuum chinchilla hay anymore. I have a nice remodeled apartment, and the carpet is new, and the fork pulls clump after clump of brand-new-carpet fuzz from the hose–this was unavoidable, I realize, and not my fault. My chinchillas are bouncing around the room while all the parts lie on the floor around me–the hose, the belt, the plastic bottom (wheels still attached)–so I can reach the last bit of hose underneath. Luna hops over, grabs one of the metal screws with her teeth, and scurries down the hallway. I spook her until she drops the screw, piece the parts back together, then resurrect the monster.

I won’t lie–today’s a good day. I’m happily repair-savvy and chasing chinchillas with a vacuum cleaner, hoping I won’t clog it again.

Tell me about a storage unit or someplace you stored things.

One thing I’ll always miss about home is the Christmas tree. More than the holiday itself, it was that living room conifer growing heavy with laughter and light in its stand that made the holidays my favorite time of year.

Granted, I was taken in by the rest, as well: the gradual build-up of gifts and cards and white packed snow and Christmas spirit; the shopping and spending and wrapping and bows; the holiday dinner with turkey and ham and wine and bread and too many people; the party on New Year’s Eve with the snap of pool cues, late-night cards, hide-and-seek in the dark, errant fireworks on the cold white lawn. The words everyone felt but nobody said.

But there was something about the tree that made it worthwhile, something in those heavy green branches, the spicy scent of pine or spruce, the lights, the glitz, the ornaments.

The attic. Crawling precariously over a skeleton of boards and pink fiberglass insulation, rustling through boxes, searching for the ones without pumpkins and witches and bats, Easter eggs, white rabbits, birthday greetings. And when we found the wreaths and garlands, half carrying, half dropping the awkward cardboard receptacles down the stairs. We worked in teams–my mother and brother and I, box from person to person to person, out of the attic, down the stairs. In the end we’d sit on the living room floor, the old warped and water-stained box of decorations on the fireplace hearth, pulling old ornaments from their compartments. From stone to cardboard to synthetics to skin.

Decorating was my favorite part, and there was lots to work with–the lights with their six different flash settings for entertainment, the furry gold snakes of garlands, the shiny rainbow of painted tin balls, the silver points. There were those whose origins I barely remembered: crocheted snowflakes, lace-covered candy canes, tiny wooden-framed cross-stitchings. There were candy wreaths, macaroni wreaths, baked gingerbread snowmen. There were balls swirled with paint and ribbon I’d made with a friend, little felt bears slightly stuffed and stitched with smiles and clothes and bells that moved, a clothespin nutcracker, a wooden sleigh. A white sand dollar hand-painted with glitter and tiny poinsettias, requiring the strongest branch on the tree, and my favorite–two baby seals on a patch of ice–that got center stage. The star glowed many different colors and sat on top, the presents seemed to radiate, everything was bright–even when the rest of life wasn’t.

When Christmas was over, we’d pile the gifts in our rooms and sweep up the needles and put each ornament back in its own little room in a warped cardboard house, our memories packed in the attic with scraps of glass and plastic and fabric in a fiberglass castle, a cold and quiet dark.

Tell me about how a relationship ended. (Names changed.)

There were a lot of ways it ended. I stopped loving him, for one. Over a year prior, in fact, without realizing it, without realizing love like that really comes to an end without you choosing to stop it. The way I started getting angry when he left hair in the bathroom sink, when the dirty dishes weren’t in the dishwasher. How I felt when he told me again and again with his camo-green eyes, No, I haven’t been smoking, after I detected the scent behind his tight-lipped kiss.

How it really ended, though, really physically ended, went something like this: he opened the back door after work, sent me a shifty glance and a muffled reply. I continued my work on the computer as I heard him close the bedroom door and shuffle around. He hadn’t been as talkative after spending the night in a local jail, which I called at the suggestion of a friend who didn’t know where he was when I awoke to an empty bed, and no sign of his usual slump on the beige futon. It was only a week after that event, after I called his parents, shaky, telling them he’d been arrested for his second DUI and driving without a license, and his mother said to me one last time, “Why didn’t you…” …nothing, knowing at last I couldn’t stop him from what he wanted, couldn’t share the blame.

He came out of the bedroom and sat on the couch, where he’d set up a new computer on the coffee table, and I went to the bathroom. The shower curtain looked odd–weighted, as if something was pushing against it, pulling on it, and when I tugged it open I found the bathtub full of clothes–his–a large pile of sweaters and jeans and socks strewn across the porcelain, stretching to the drain and faucet. I knew it was his weird, symbolic way of trying to leave.

When I asked him about it he said, “Have you slept with him?”

“What?” The answer was no, and I wouldn’t have, but I was in love with someone else. And I didn’t know how he knew.

Finally, I said, “I don’t think this is working. It hasn’t been for a long time.” It was like a bad movie.

His eyes glassed over. I felt nothing.

“But I still love you,” he squeezed out, head in his hands. I saw none of that–no more midnight drives with Pink Floyd filling the car. No more daytime picnics on the grass in Hidden Springs (I’d never tell you where it is). No more floating down Boise’s Snake River in rubber tubes or scrounging for rare rock albums at the Record Exchange. No more truthful smiles, no more passionate sex. No more of what I could barely remember.

“You don’t love me, Dave,” I said gently, pulling on my jacket. “You just need me.”

And, pushing my way through the back door, the night, I left him there, the way someone leaves a pair of socks with holes in the toes in a bag next to banana peels and empty tomato soup cans, when nothing more can be done for them. The way someone says, Look, I’m sorry, when they’re not. The way someone, quiet at first, tears from a womb.

(Sorry, I know this is one-sided, unjustified and somewhat vague. This is probably the end of something I need a lot more space to write.)

Everything about it was yellow: the bright formica counter tops, the patterned wallpaper, the cupboards, the gauzy curtains, the aging refrigerator. It reeked of the sixties, when my mother was still a child, when it was still common to have a bright yellow kitchen. My grandma attached colored pencil drawings I had done as a child to the refrigerator and back door: little red foxes and caves and sunsets. The cupboards were always stocked with familiar plastic cups in the shape of rabbits or bears, ears protruding from the lids, and a canister of grape Kool-Aid mix to fill them with, the sugar never quite dissolving at the bottom of the finished product, straws wading in the sweet purple sludge.

Here is where most of the magic happened–the popcorn my grandma used to make, the rattle of kernels filling the old-fashioned popcorn maker, white fluff spilling out the chute at the top, some bits missing the bowl entirely. Mason jars full of pears and peaches she’d bring from some dark place in the basement, the syrupy sweetness in white china bowls, the clink of spoons against porcelain. My grandma had a habit of bringing us snacks of all kinds–ice cream in sturdy, ornate wine glasses, cheddar cheese and crackers and salami, bags of pre-shelled sunflower seeds, barbecue peanuts, carrots from her garden with dill-flavored dip, the sweetest pickled beets I’d ever taste, homemade donuts, raspberries with sugar and milk. The latter was my favorite.

Everything regarding that kitchen was always pleasant–the color, the smells of cooking, the drawings, the doilies, the perpetual cleanness, the milkmaid figurines atop the refrigerator. I loved everything it represented: its tastes, its kindness, the desire and happiness it created.

Once (I think I was around eight years old), she was making me breakfast, the way she knew I loved it–bacon, toast with the crusts cut off, an abundance of scrambled eggs (cooked in the bacon grease, the yolk and whites still somewhat separate, the way I cook them now). It was beautiful, the way she would lay it out, orange slices on the side, a glass of milk, the toast cut into buttery rectangles. I was impatient this time, waiting in the dining room, and expressing it outwardly (out of character for me)–mimicking some cartoon I’d seen, fork in hand, pounding my fists on the table, chanting for my food.

After a minute, my grandma had had enough. She appeared in the doorway, face flushed, spatula in hand, and yelled, “It will just be a few more minutes! You will wait.”

I was silenced immediately, stunned and instantly regretting my behavior. Those moments of tension between us were a blip amidst all the good memories of that kitchen, but I would never forget them.

The old camper still sits in my parents’ yard next to the shed. It’s too old and run-down to really sell–the frame dented in places, paint peeling, brown leather seats ripped, cupboard latches stuck–but I’m not sure why they keep it. I don’t know when it was made or remember where it came from, but it might have been a hand-me-down from my grandparents. The wood looked cheap–not-quite-honey-colored; the walls were canvas, the floor fake marble, the curtains retro checkered-green. Everything else was brown, including the tiny refrigerator–which had a lock made out of a screw that simply dropped through a hole in a metal loop (something that fascinated me as a child). It was the only thing I could easily open and close, and I felt the need to lock it–maybe as a retaliation, because at that age the cupboard latches already stuck–and everything was latched.

As a child I remember our camping trips feeling more foreign, even though most of them probably took place at Fraser Lake, B.C., not that far from where I lived. We always spent much more time outside the camper, in the water (often trying to wrestle in the dog, who couldn’t stand it), around the fire pit, looking for agates in the sand to fill the bear-shaped peanut butter jar which probably contained more sanded glass and translucent rocks than anything else. I remember once, though, parking the truck (camper fit snugly on the back) next to a large cabin out in the middle of nowhere, ready for visitors and equipped with nothing but a board game involving either elephants or hippos, and parachutes or other floating devices. And I will never forget Germansen Lake, where the “outhouse” was made of boards, a hole, and dirty curtains, where the water was far too cold to swim in, where we were isolated from humankind and the rain came in torrents for seven days straight. Never would I develop a more intimate relationship with that camper.

(This is unfinished. Have much more to say.)