The Room My Father Built
And the ridiculous thing: I opened the archive.
I took the panel off entirely — not the frame, the panel — and I had a joiner in and we turned that four-by-six void into a proper little room.
Lit, ventilated, shelved floor to ceiling, with a door that has a handle on it like a door.
My father’s four hundred drawings are in it, flat now, in map drawers rather than tubes, properly.
It took three days and about eleven hundred dollars and I stood in it when it was finished and cried for about twenty minutes, and I have never been able to explain to anybody exactly why, and I have stopped trying.
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