tooth fairy tracks

My grandfather took this shot, at a lovely little nothing of a weekend shack that he and my grandmother had on Discovery Bay on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

I love the light of it.
That sofa.
The memory of that place.

The thought of my Bompa pulling focus and firing the shutter.

I was probably four here and, it would seem, a mouth-breather.

My sister’s tooth was loose.

Later she would lose it and, in the morning light, my father would show us the wrinkled tracks that the tooth fairy left on the bed sheets when she visited in the night.

I didn’t know then that his marriage to my mother was on the rocks. Or maybe I did.

And maybe I was just beginning to suspect how big the world was, how impossible it would be to get my arms around it all, how vast continents would remain forever out of reach, and just how completely that would break my heart.