Mom is packing up her home: music into boxes wrapped tightly with packing tape, half finished glasses of scotch and water wound in bubble wrap, and foam peanuts all around their last months together in the convertible on the roads out east, to the antique dealers and auctions, Dad’s fingers waggling over items he wanted to bid on, over their plates of hors d’oeuvres with strawberry names, the fountain of punch burbling in the back room, the sound of the screen door and the sunflowers growing stronger as he got weaker. There is silence on that street of big oak trees. I cannot visit it. I will not revisit it. I loved that place where they slept downy in the downy winter, a fox across the street under the diffuse beam of a streetlight, the piano nobody played, Dad’s music loud one day, quiet the next. She is leaving the hardware store and the gift store with its free coffee and chat to customers. The neighbours with their good intentions and open ways, the big fields down the street with blazing crickets and the little brook where we threw pebbles at the shadows of fish, the baseball diamonds where the girls and I ran in bare feet at dusk, the little one forgetting to run when she hit the ball. Go! Go! Go! We’d shout and she’d grin and scurry. Goodnight tree house and back bedroom where Christmas snuck in under the door. Goodnight chiming grandfather clock he wound with the rasp of pulling chains. Goodnight rose of Sharon tree with his bungee cords securing its unruly branches, and apples rotting underfoot in fall, and maze of night in the corn with Halloween costumes on, and driving through the fields and the little towns with chocolate factories and heritage homes, goodnight smell of beeswax and pine in the cool night air, goodnight sound of owl outside the bathroom window, goodnight slow shuffle of cards as they played one more hand. Closing off my life with your father, she said. That’s all.