That’s not a law. It’s not universal advice. Some situations are different; some family dynamics require different navigation; some people are dealing with stakes that are higher or lower or more complicated than mine. But that’s what I learned, in this specific situation, and I’m writing it down because maybe the shape of it is recognizable to someone who needs to recognize it.
## What the Apartment Has Become
By March, the apartment had become its own thing. My mother had hung the pictures she’d brought from the house — the same prints and framed photos that had lived on the walls of the house, rearranged to fit the different dimensions and angles of the apartment walls. The arrangement was different but the objects were the same, and walking in felt increasingly like walking into a place my parents lived rather than a place they’d been deposited.
My father had joined the community’s woodworking club, which I had not anticipated. He’d done some woodworking when Adam and I were very young — a bookshelf that lived in the basement, a couple of projects I remembered vaguely — and had apparently always meant to return to it when he had time. Now he had time. He was making a small side table, which he showed me a photo of on his phone. ‘It’s not as square as it should be,’ he said, with the specific tone of someone who is more interested in the project than bothered by the imperfection.
My mother had made two friends in the community. I knew about them the way I know about peripheral figures in my parents’ lives — they appeared in conversation with consistent enough frequency that they’d become reference points. One of them grew tomatoes on her patio and had given my mother seedlings in March. My mother’s apartment patio now contained four small tomato plants in containers, which she monitored with the same proprietary attention she’d given the climbing rose.