On the second floor of my grandmother's house were four bedrooms. Hers was the big room at the front corner of the house, and her windows looked out over the park. During visits, my dad would stay in the second bedroom, the one with the hidden laundry chute, and I would stay in the little bedroom at the top of the stairs, the one with hard wood floors and yellow flowers on the wallpaper.

There are three things I remember clearly about staying in that room. First, the bed was so high I could sit cross-legged underneath it and keep my back almost completely straight. And once, when I was about three, I had been put down for a nap in that bed. Fast asleep, I sat up and sang "Happy Birthday" with the next door neighbors, who were having an outdoor party in the yard below. Next, there was a dresser, empty but for the gifts Grandma would leave for me when I visited: little bags of M&Ms, a bell painted like an old Southern mammy, a tiny bamboo box full of tinier, thread-wrapped worry dolls. And the third memory...a painting of a patient, benevolent face that watched me from its dark, oval frame. A pretty young girl? A saint? The Christ child?

The fourth bedroom on the second floor was the picture room. Two walls were completely covered in photographs, most black-and-white and none framed. Grandma had tacked these to the walls in no particular order. I knew no one in the pictures, yet I was fascinated by their faces. Nuns in cat-eye glasses, sepia-toned families in starched frills and high collars, snapshots taken of a bridge game in someone's kitchen, embraces, kids playing in yards, graduations, military portraits. I wonder if the pictures stopped going up when the wall space ran out.