The rest of the house looked pretty much the same. The garden we’d planted out back had taken up most of one side of the yard, which was pretty large. We’d found that we both had an affinity for gardening, and while the kids were growing up they each grew their own vegetables and some raspberries. We still had the tomato plants because Alice refused to eat them from the store, claiming that they were way too bland. The rest of the veggies had been taken out years ago and replaced with flowers, and they covered the yard. I wasn’t quite as into the entire thing as Alice turned out to be, but I still thought the colors were pretty.

Over the years, the stone walls of Alice’s outdoor office had become mostly overgrown with ivy and climbing flowers. It made it look a little bit like something out of a fairy tale, and she still loved sitting out there with her notebook and pen. Well, had loved, before the stroke. While it did have electricity, she never brought a computer out here, claiming that to write in a place like this a person needed real paper, not a screen.

Remembering her saying this, sitting there in the living room gazing out of the picture window at the backyard, almost made me cry. I decided to get up and move out of the living room. There were too many memories there. The entire house had too many memories of our lives before the stroke, but in here, it just seemed like too much.

I think the pictures on the wall behind the couch made it feel so poignant. There were photographs from our trips to Ireland with the kids, our wedding, Charlie and Kallie’s high school and college graduations, and a bunch of pictures of gatherings with everyone. The wall was practically covered, and it was a pretty big wall. I loved it. Alice had started hanging pictures there on a whim, and we’d never organized them. They were in no sort of order whatsoever, but they were all happy, and I think that’s why I’ve always loved that wall more than anything else in the house.

In the middle, right over the couch, was a picture of Charlie being held in Bette and Tina’s pool by Shane at about six years old. She was trying to get him to swim underwater to Jenny on the other side of the pool without surfacing. He’d been enrolled in swimming classes for several years by then and was really good, but he had problems with breath control because he had a fear of drowning if he stayed under too long. He hadn’t been able to get over that in all the years he’d been swimming, so he usually swam backstroke more than anything else. He was much better at the breaststroke, but he was too scared to do it.