I’m tall for my age—everyone says that—with blond hair that poofs out over my ears, and broken-and-badly-glued horn-rimmed glasses crooked on my face. Tall and awkward and frozen forever in bright amber sunlight beside my father and grandparents in the tiny, barren side yard of 1331 Fairview, Wichita, Kansas, 67203. We’re in town for Grandma and Grandpa’s golden anniversary—October 15th—and I’ve been out exploring on the ancient balloon-tired bicycle my Uncle Bob found for me in their garage.

My mother must have been behind the camera. I’ve seen this photo enough times now that I barely remember standing there, having my picture taken. Or maybe I only think I remember. But Mamma was the family photographer, and so I imagine her dark, wavy hair behind the camera, her fragile arthritic fingers cupped carefully around it like the legs of a dead spider. 

What people remembered about my grandfather was his smile. He’s old, thin, a little stooped, but his smile, even in this brittle, curling snapshot, is glorious. It goes back almost to his ears, and all the way up to his eyes. Not long after this, Grandpa will die—I never knew he could, until he did—and in less than twenty years, everyone will be dead but me.

Daddy didn’t smile like that. He was a quiet man. But sometimes at home he would throw back his head and laugh, har har har har, and you could count the gold crowns on his back teeth. We had his body cremated, and put the ashes in the hall closet. Too much else to do to think about them then. A few months later, after Mamma finished dying, I picked up her ashes from the same funeral home. I took them both down to Portland, Oregon—Willamette National Cemetery—in Daddy’s old spray-painted blue Chevy Impala, so rusted out you could see the road under your feet as you drove. But before that, I opened each box and blew a handful of ashes into their front yard. 

Much later I realized that there had been no gold in Daddy’s box. It took me a while to realize that the funeral home must have stolen all those crowns. I thought about suing, but I didn’t, of course. What I wanted back was that laugh.

And my grandmother, smiling politely for the camera. She wasn’t one to fuss over children, but I adored her, and she tolerated my tomboy ways. By the time I reach my mid-teens, she will disapprove: of the way I dress, act, think. But at the last she will thread a hand through the bars of the hospital bed, an Old Testament matriarch in a faded cotton gown, and bless me.

So we’re standing, a little overexposed: Grandpa in a long-sleeved shirt, Grandma in a dress and pumps (she even gardened that way), Daddy in a short-sleeved sport shirt, and me in tan shorts and a plaid shirt, squinting into the sun, with a corner of the house in the background. We sold that house not long before Mamma died. Uncle Bob and I held her up in bed, and the contract in front of her. She stared at it wide-eyed, with crazy Einstein hair, and then signed, her once-perfect signature a quavering ghost of itself.

Years later, I took my elder daughter there. We were driving from Little Rock to Denver the week after 9/11. I pulled up outside the familiar white frame duplex on its gray rock foundation and suddenly I was crying. Not the tears-run-quietly-down-your-face kind, but the nose-running, chin-dripping, sobbing, choking, howling kind. I had never cried like that in front of another human being, and God knows I never meant to start in front of my daughter.

Well. Eventually I went up to the front door and knocked. I was going to say that my family had owned that house for almost 70 of its 80 years, ask if we could just step for a moment into the front room—that’s what my grandparents called it. But nobody was home. So I showed Lucy where the porch swing had been, and where I had carved my name in the bush the Christmas I got my pocketknife. We scuffed through dead leaves past the kitchen window where Grandma always stood waving good-bye, to the back stoop. There was a Mexican blanket in the window, but I was able to see inside just a little to the spot where my grandfather died. His heart just stopped one perfect July day while he was washing the car.

Are you familiar with Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “Hunchback Girl: She Thinks of Heaven?” “My Father,” it begins, “it is surely a blue place/ And straight. Right. Regular.” When this girl, hunched of soul if not of back, thinks of heaven, it feels like that house. We moved when I was young, six houses in six years, and my baby sister died one night at a circus in a parking lot while they shot a woman from a cannon. All the permanence and love and belonging I could ever imagine are bound up for me in those people and that house. I wish you could see more of the house in the photo.

But here we stand, Grandpa with his dazzling grin; me, glasses crooked, squinting into the sun; Grandma, perfectly composed, and Daddy, head characteristically cocked into the gold-glow of a glorious Indian summer afternoon.