It was the smell of pine and cold water and my grandfather’s coffee on the screened porch at six in the morning.
It was the dock I’d learned to swim off of, the loose third step he never fixed on purpose because he said a house should have one board that talks to you.
It was where I’d gone every summer of my life until I was grown, and where we’d scattered a little of him when he died, and where I had stood five years ago watching strangers carry his furniture out to a truck because none of us could afford to keep it, and had made myself stop crying in the driveway so my mother wouldn’t have to comfort me on top of everything else.
I had lost that place.
I had folded up the grief and put it somewhere I didn’t look at often, because there was no use in it — the cabin was gone, sold, someone else’s, and wanting it back was like wanting to be nine years old again.
And my husband, it turned out, had been quietly listening every one of the handful of times I’d let that grief show.