Dear Father,

Why did you keep taking me to your childhood home? 

Now that you’re dying, no one else wants to go there with me. My mother drives through in a rush, too spooked to stop more than a moment. 

Decrepit but still standing, then vacant, covered in weedy trees and vine, now cleared again, vacant, but not one of Mayor Pete’s thousand homes chosen for demolition during his reign.

I take throwaway photos through car windows.

Last summer, on one of my South Bend visits, I took images all the way back down Sample Street like breadcrumbs. My tour of the necropastoral, unraveling my birthright, my broken girlhood. 

I become obsessed with one memory you must no longer know. As I write this, you no longer know me. You’ve stopped eating without someone scooping, spooning into your mouth.

Every time I remember you are in a nursing home two hours from me, in your third wife’s countryside birthplace, I have to shake my head and hands to keep from crying, and all I want to do is fall asleep.

My psychic says your spirit is floating around, singing lalalalala. . . 

You come to me in a dream, in a red shirt and healthy, able to hold conversation, alert. You also have been visiting my mother in dreams, much to her exasperation. She’s been done with you for thirty years. You’re traveling now, but your body is still heavy and here.

The memory I’m obsessed with goes like this: instead of riding our bikes around the neighborhood (a favorite pastime of ours), we sometimes pedal downtown by the St. Joseph River. One day, we travel from the river to your childhood home on Webster Street, the one your immigrant grandparents bought and passed to your father, who was born in Austria and came here as a child.

I remember the sun, its heat. I remember the grit of the neighborhood and broken sidewalks. I remember going through a broken chain link fence. I remember I shouldn’t tell my mother because she’d say it’s too dangerous.

I remember seeing the nondescript house and knowing your father, my grandfather, hanged himself from a cherry tree in the backyard. I remember this was a much more intimate way of seeing. Mostly, we would drive by. I think I remember the train tracks, the junkyard, or was that just your telling me? 

You never told me about your father. I knew this by osmosis, though in reality it must have been from my mother, who was tired of secrets and her own family full of them.

My mother says she doesn’t know this story. No surprise I wouldn’t have told her. I used to be prone to keeping secrets. 

I want to ask you why you took me there. I want to know, was I six? Ten? Thirteen? Did we really ride from the river? Or from your high school, Riley? From Rum Village, the park you took us to so often? Where on the map were we? 

Mostly where was the threshold? The chain link? Were we in the alleyway? Was the massive cherry tree still alive? 

My mind circles what can’t be held—that reveal when I lifted the metal mesh and stepped through, that angle of light on a summer day with you, as if I was in your shirt pocket, so quiet and close. I’ll keep interrogating the light, the bicycles, your thick hands and your handkerchief, until my memory no longer keeps this, too.

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Natalie Solmer was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, a granddaughter of Polish and German immigrants. She worked for many years as a horticulturist and florist and is now an Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. She also founded and edits The Indianapolis Review. She has published poems in journals such as North American Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and Mom Egg Review. Her debut book of poetry, Water Castle, was recently published with Kelsay Books.