By two in the afternoon I was standing in the back hall with four cardboard boxes I’d saved from behind the grocery store.

I started taking Mama’s flowered housecoats off their wire hangers in the bedroom closet, folding them into neat squares and humming the second verse of How Great Thou Art.

Her bedroom smelled of lavender soap and mothballs, the same as it had for forty years.

I packed her brown plastic radio, her box of church handkerchiefs and two piles of old baking magazines into the first box.

I set three pairs of her black walking shoes in a row by the bedroom door, making sure all the toes pointed toward the hall.