sueconners11

I used to visit the old house while it was still standing. Not often. Just enough to know where things were. Enough to feel the difference between a place that belonged to our family and a place that belonged to everyone else. My grandfather had a souvenir shop next door, and that’s where most of my memories begin — not inside the house, but in the space between. He would give me colored gumballs that my mother disapproved of me having- on the sly, I thought, but my Mom always knew and found...

I always begin where my grandfather’s house used to be. Not because there’s anything to see there now. There isn’t. There’s pavement, the edge of a parking lot, the kind of ground that doesn’t invite lingering. Cars come and go without knowing what they pass over. But I know. I remember. And that has always been enough. His mother came to Canada at the beginning of the World War 1, carting two children and whatever she could hold onto. I imagine my grandfather and his sister just being...