Looking for Home

WHERE DO YOU LIVE?” he asked. It was an important issue for my father—he asked me this same question every time we talked. “Where do you live now?” He knew I no longer lived with him and my mother, but he couldn’t seem to imagine me anywhere else.

I ran through the options in my head, trying to think of the best way to answer that might make him understand and remember. A street name was too specific. “I live in a small bungalow in south Minneapolis,” I replied.

He had been to my house many times since my husband and I bought it roughly two years before. Circulation problems and Alzheimer’s had turned my father into a shuffler, so he would hold my hand to negotiate the three steps from the walkway to our front door. Every time, he’d walk through the door onto our three-season porch and say, “I think I’ve been here before.” Then he’d stop, as if distracted by the surroundings, and take in the expanse of the small porch. I would stand at his side, trying to understand what his brain