When Grandma got older, she could no longer climb the stairs to her bed. For a while, she had a special bed in the living room, a big, clumsy bed with metal side rails and an egg-carton foam pad. This was a strange fixture among the antique roll-top desk, the silver candlesticks, the lace curtains. This arrangement did not last long. Soon, her kids had to move her to a first-floor apartment two blocks away.

I was eleven the summer we went back to Madelia to clean out Grandma's house. And early one morning, after spending the night at Grandma Jessop's home, I walked across town to the big house on the corner of the park. The house had already been sold, and I bit my lip as I walked past the realtor's sign staked in the yard. I went in the back door, as I always did, and felt for the first time like a trespasser. I wandered from room to room, from the basement to the attic, from the sun porch to the second floor, where the walls in the picture room had been stripped bare.

In every corner of the house, aunts and uncles busily boxed up Grandma's things. Hushed little spats erupted between siblings and in-laws about who had given Grandma what, about who got to take away with them certain pieces of furniture, particular childhood mementos, letters, books, clothing, jewelry, art, dishes. No one noticed me, even as I tried to strike up conversation, and all I really wanted was for someone smile, to let me know it was okay for me to be there. But nothing. That was the last time I walked out of Grandma's house.