The unfreedom had been that total, and that daily, and that invisible, woven so deeply into the ordinary texture of her life that she had stopped feeling it as unfreedom at all.

And now it was gone.

Not the grand freedoms, the ones that make speeches — just the small, hourly, human freedom to want a thing and buy it and answer to no one.

That is the freedom my father had quietly taken, one strawberry at a time, for thirty-four years, and it is the one my mother wept with joy to have back, and it is the one, I understood at last, that had been the whole point all along.

My father lives alone in the front house now.

I still visit him — I take him to his appointments when his back gives out, I bring groceries when he needs them.