I flip on the light at the top of the stairs in the house. It’s still “our house” even though I left for Southern California over twenty years ago. Even now as a grown woman, the basement is one of my favorite haunts. It’s cool and a bit damp, musty but not dusty. Warm with the fragrances of leftover wood my father would piddle with in his workshop. Spare blocks of the stuff everywhere, ‘cause you never knew what size you’d need…

My favorite errand when I was young was to head down there to help paint one of the airplane models we worked on or fetch the next puzzle to solve.

Now I’m here to help them both. Mom because she can’t deal. Dad because his habit has dealt him the lifetime smoker trifecta: advanced congestive heart failure, emphysema, and most recently, lung cancer. His kidneys are also shot, so managing three-times a week dialysis piles on more stress.

I try to keep them calm, organized, and fed while managing the often conflicting but endless dietary restrictions, doctors’ appointments, and medications. 

This role reversal with aging parents is happening to all my girlfriends of a certain age. This is our forties. Our parents are in the winter of their lives while we still bask in the warmth of summer. But the chill is coming…

I step down the stairs and my mind descends into my childhood. How can I be this totally put-together person in my normal life, but set one foot in my childhood home and I am eight years old? I love this basement and wish I could just wallow in the familiar scent. I wish I could carry it with me but we don’t do basements in San Diego. I round up the boxes I came for and go back upstairs.

I add to the pile of photo albums and other memorabilia we plan to sort through. I know my father is proud of his family, and we’ve spent hours looking at pictures. I adored his brother, my Uncle Floyd, although the others I barely, or never, knew. There are stacks and stacks of letters and things I cannot connect to. They are his, and not mine. 

I love history and storytelling, yet I’ve never understood my inability to memorize these stories. I can’t latch on to them and keep them dear. Which makes me feel like a failure, as though I’m not valuing my loving father, that I’m somehow betraying him. I was always his daughter. Adopted, yes. But still my father’s daughter—a “Daddy’s Girl” if there ever was one. How can his family not also be mine?

But they are not, in fact, mine. Adoption created our family. I am their daughter fully in my mind and heart. But not in bone and blood. I sit with biological ghosts I’ve never allowed myself to imagine. Specters unseen and unfelt. The apparitions of an unacknowledged desire—even to myself.

I’m here for them, but no one is here for me. Not that anyone ever was. 

Never have I seriously thought about finding the mother and father who gave me up. Only now can I see what is wrong with that term, “giving someone up for adoption.” Did they give up on me, or themselves?

I have never wanted to look for them. Never felt I had the right. This unconscious rule was not explained or said aloud. I created and internalized it. My parents are my parents and that was it. My job now is to honor them and pay back all they did for me. I sift through the pile of albums and organize them for my father, so they are sorted when he wakes from his nap.

It’s April, the month of my birth. And apparently, also my relinquishment. Nearby is an array of freshly cut lilacs, their intoxicating beauty fills the room. Their heady fragrance reminds me of home. And yes, this is home.

In this season in my hometown of Yakima, the air itself thickens with the scent of growth. We’re the fruit basket of the north: apples, cherries, peaches, and berries fill the valley from end to end. Even the dirt smells alive. San Diego’s salty sunshine can’t compete.

My childhood was filled with both joy and confusion. My mother and I have never had a smooth ride, and I know with daddy leaving soon, she and I also lose our buffer. The one that kept us easy. Or, easier, at least. Now I struggle to reconcile the collision of adult pain that has nowhere to go. I love my family dearly and recognize the only path to peace lies in letting go. 

Contained within us is a dance through time. In my childhood home I embody who I am now, and all I was. Alive in both the spring and summer of my life. Mother is autumn; her leaves beginning to turn and fall. Daddy is winter; frail, and white. 

Can I endure these seasons as they unfold? Embrace the warmth and endure the cold? The child within me hurts and my adult self must care for her, my grown self, and my parents as they recede from this existence. The slow slide into the ether and whatever comes next, they too will join the ever after. Inside the house, all is silent as I look out the back window.

Outside our house, we are surrounded with growth and awakening while inside I attend to the dying and deny the ghosts of others that only I can claim.