Inside the house there were hundreds of pictures on the walls, photographs of children and adults long dead or living far away. Two stern black sofas sat against the wall, facing an old-fashioned indoor stove perched in the middle of the living room. Rust stains decorated the bath tub, and lights were turned on by pulling a string.

Two years ago we visited my grandmother, who had become thinner and more forgetful than last time I saw her. In the guest room upstairs I found books. Classics almost a century old, newer books from the sixties, left over from when my dad and his sisters and cousins spent glorious, carefree summers with their grandmother. Wasps had built a nest into one of the books upstairs. My brothers were scared to sleep near it, even though all the wasps were dead. The second floor was closer to the tin roof, and a summer thunderstorm kept me awake for most of the first night. Hiding under the covers, I remembered my dad telling me about the ghost that inhabits the second floor.

From then on I slept downstairs with my brothers.

One day we went to the river. My dad knew a path that would take us there. He had walked along it many times when he was a boy. We hacked our way through the overgrowth, finally emerging on a well-beaten dirt path, with the river right below us. My dad’s childhood play area had become a recreational reserve, complete with trail guides, maps, and precautions against liability suits. At the end of the trail was a quiet pool of water off to the side of the main river. We could swim there. Water in backwoods Tennessee is clean, unlike the polluted little creek in my hometown that only foolish kids dare wade in and no one fishes in anymore.

We went to another part of the river, a part I used to wade in when I was younger. The road was blocked off, because of the construction of a giant interstate that bridged the gap between two mountains. The support beams, over a hundred feet high, towered above us, strange monoliths rising out of a primitive world of trees. We passed by the construction site several times during our vacation, the van looping around the mountain and over the current bridge, a tiny concrete one named after an ancestor of mine.

On the third day of our visit, my dad wanted to walk to a piece of property that my grandmother owns. He used to go there all the time as a boy. The path we took is now a gravel road, and trees had been replaced by modern houses made to look old. We walked around for hours, but it became too dark to see. With the all the houses and roads, my dad couldn’t remember where the property was, so we went back to my grandmother’s house.

After a week we finally left, not knowing it was the last time we’d visit that house.

Two years later my grandmother came to stay with my family in my hometown. She has Alzheimer’s. My aunt and uncle bought the house next to theirs, planning to let her live there. I wonder how long it will be before they admit she can’t live by herself anymore.

Moving in. My uncles and my dad were talking as they unloaded furniture.

“You should sell her old stuff,” said my dad. “I’ll bet some of it’s worth a lot, like that old Coke machine.”

“I saw a Coke machine half that size offered for five thousand dollars,” said my aunt, emerging from the house. “I’ll bet the bigger one is worth even more.”

“Auction it off on eBay,” said my dad.

I looked through the old stuff that was brought in. There was a suitcase propped open, with various items inside. I took out a wallet that was threatening to fall apart. Inside was a Social Security card from 1939, still in decent shape. In the living room there were two guitars and a toy fiddle that really plays. My aunt remembered how proud of the little fiddle my grandmother was.

My uncle pawed through the case, coming up with the original instructions. “This is probably worth a lot with the original instructions,” he said.

I looked through the drawers of a Singer sewing machine and found an old school permission slip, a park brochure, and a buried card. It was an official “Snooper’s License”, and my dad’s name was written across it in a childish scrawl. He didn’t remember it, but I noticed that he kept it.

My dad and I finally returned home, leaving the others to finish unpacking.

Later that summer I went to Tennessee with a friend. We drove past my great-grandmother’s old house with hardly a glance, but after a few miles I stopped my friend and told him to turn around.

“I want to see if the bridge they were building is done,” I said.

It was done, towering above the trees. The river it crosses is much too small for such a gargantuan bridge. I wondered what happened to the old bridge, the one named after my ancestor. We ventured underneath the bridge and came upon the old road. The original bridge was blocked off, and we saw why. It was rotting, falling apart. The supports were beginning to sag into the river, and the concrete crumbled in my hand.