My grandfather ran Hodapp's Clothing on Madelia's Main Street. The store was still open when I was very young, so I have only one memory of being inside. I remember my dad taking me by the hand and leading me up two green carpeted steps from the sidewalk to the front door. I remember a dark interrior. I remember tie racks. I remember an uncle working behind the counter, though I don't remember which one. No, my memories of the store were confined to our front closet, where there were heavy wooden coat hangers bearing the Hodapp-Nelson insignia, and to a box of old, yellowed newspaper clippings someone had saved, advertisements for sales on cuff links, belts, galoshes.

Years later, when I was sixteen and when my family had returned to Madelia for Grandma Jessop's funeral, I saw the last traces of Grandpa Hodapp's store. We were staying on the top floor of an old building on the corner of main street, a building someone had converted to a modern bed and breakfast with only two rooms. The window of our room looked out over the flat, rain-slicked, tar-papered roof of the adjacent building. Not much of a view. But at the far end of that rooftop, perhaps thirty feet away, a brick wall rose up an extra story. My grandfather's store. And there, where chipped and peeling paint still clung to the brick exterior of the building, were the remains of the store's sign.

My mom said during that visit that Madelia was a dying town, and I think, when I saw my own last name on that faded sign, I believed her. But perhaps I believed her only to the extent that Madelia was dying to me. For her, she had lost her mother. And for me, the death of my grandmother meant more than the loss of a person; I grieved the loss of the one last reason I had to visit this place. I was sixteen, well past the age most children exorcise their needs for imaginary friends or tattered blankets. But I grieved all the same. I had no one left here to visit, nothing left in Madelia but childhood memories.

I have not been back to Madelia since.