“It’s the famous Cancun potato!”

And all three of us burst out laughing — a real laugh, the kind that bends you over, the kind we had not done nearly enough of in the old house.

I want you to sit with that for a moment, because it is the whole of everything.

Months before, in a dining room, that patch of potatoes had been an instrument of contempt — a way to put me in my place, to send the wife off to grub in the dirt while the family she served went to the sea.

It had been meant to make me small.

And now, in a gold November light, my daughter was holding one of those very potatoes over her head and laughing, and the word Cancun had become a family joke, our joke, a thing that made us happy.