Entering the abandoned house, we tiptoed on shards of glass. The windows must have shattered long ago; the oak floors were  badly warped. We smelled damp wood, wet wallpaper paste, molding plaster. This house once sheltered a family—our great grandparents and their ten children.

We couldn’t see shards of the lives lived there, the storms that destroyed a year’s income, the recession that nearly ruined the family, the trauma that resulted in hitting and punching.

Yet out of the love that survived in the house came this clan of descendants—the doctor, the lawyer, the merchant, the chief.