Do you remember when we convinced you to streak around the house? Of course you do; you bring it up every time I introduce you to someone. I remember your slender ass glimpsed through a succession of windows, the white soles of your running feet, your pistoning arms, your screeches when you regained our front porch to discover we’d locked the door.
I once heard a female academic talk about the necessity of “de-gendering the private sphere,” and the past year would certainly seem to confirm that, what with children (including my own) and baskets of dirty laundry creeping into the backgrounds of Zoom calls.
“Start with a woman watching a man / catching his daughter.” But find you see with the eyes of the child: yourself, small as a gangly loaf of bread, gripped and flung and caught at the ribs by your father, whose boyish face pumps up and down in the summer yard where he, years ago, once played.
My dad’s new house: it’s not new anymore, but it is still strange to me; I have no memories here. My mom’s house is twenty miles north, and six miles north of her is our last family home, exited with the order of a death: an inventory, the quick snatching of keepsakes, a staging, a sale.