The house belonged to me now. I say that carefully, because it still belonged to my father in a hundred ways. His workshop was still downstairs. The rooster tiles still covered the kitchen wall.

The library book — four months overdue now — still sat where he’d left it, because I’d renewed it online twice rather than take it back. His armchair still faced the television at the angle that eased his hip.

His robe still hung behind the door. The house held thirty-two years of a man who’d always shown up for the people he loved, and now it also held the work of becoming mine.

That didn’t happen overnight. All winter I spent nearly every Saturday there. I didn’t renovate; I didn’t modernize. I just lived in the space. When spring came I planted flowers near the creek, after a neighbor said the spot would be perfect, and I fixed the loose gutter over the front porch — a problem Dad had solved for years simply by not standing under it when it rained, which was very much like him.

Little by little I brought some things over from my apartment. Not everything. The house didn’t need to become an extension of my old life; it needed time to become itself again, with me inside it.

In April, Scott and Dana came for Sunday dinner, and I made Dad’s chili from the handwritten recipe card I’d found in a kitchen drawer — instructions so wonderfully vague, measuring things in enough and a good bit, that I had to guess more than once.