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in May 1953, and the Korean War ended in July. There was talk of an armistice in the months before he died, but nothing had been settled. My dad was part of a strategy to bomb irrigation dams so that floodwaters would destroy critical rail and road networks. His bomber was shot down on this maneuver, though all the dams were successfully destroyed. I suppose that’s why I always pictured him near water when I imagined him trying to find his way home.
    In Minnesota we lived with my mother’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, Gene. Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Gene lived in a suburb of Saint Cloud, in an older house in need of repair but sprawling with extra rooms. Uncle Gene worked part-time for a company that made hoses and fittings, but he and Aunt Elizabeth spent most of their waking hours caring for kids in need of a safe place to live for short periods of time. They were foster parents for the county we lived in but only took kids for the short-term— until a permanent home could be found or conditions at their own homes improved.
    Matt and I grew up in that house with dozens of foster kids, none of whom stayed longer than a few months. Aunt Elizabeth always cried when they left, and Uncle Gene always told her they would remember her for the rest of their lives. I learned early not to get too attached to any of them, especially the girls, because they always left.
    For quite some time I thought my mother had been amazingly composed during our move. I pictured her summoning a quiet strength from within and then bravely selling our house in California and moving with her two youngsters to Minnesota, a place where she had never lived before.
    Actually, my mother was close to being hospitalized because of the intensity of her grief. It was Gene and Elizabeth who took care of everything, including the sale of our house, the move, and getting us settled in the third story of their house.
    In hindsight, I suppose it was the best thing for us. My grandparents on my father’s side had offered to take us in too, but they were also awash in grief. And they lived on a farm in Kansas with no neighbors for several miles. That thought alone scared my mother, I’m sure. My mother’s parents, who lived several hours away in Fresno, offered to find us an apartment close to them, but they were going through a tough time of their own. A few years later they divorced.
    I guess I don’t have any regrets about leaving California and growing up instead in Minnesota, but I wondered, and still do, how my life would have been different if we had stayed in California.
    My mom had no professional skills, though she was an avid reader and knew something about just about everything. For nearly a year after our move, however, she read nothing except the Psalms. Then, a few days before the first anniversary of my father’s death, she began reading other things again. She started bringing books home from the library. Lots of them. I don’t remember this; I was only five. But I know she was still doing it when I was seven, when she started taking me to the library with her. And then she brought Matt. Then she started bringing the foster kids. We would all come home with piles of books. In the evenings we would lose ourselves in the pages of every kind of book imaginable. Sometimes my mother would read aloud to Matt and me and as many as five foster kids. Other times she would pull me into her lap and read to me alone. And sometimes she would pull me into her lap and she would read her book and I would read mine.
    Most people would later attribute my choice to become a teacher, especially a high-school literature teacher, to my mother and her devotion to books. And in some ways that’s true. But the older I became, the more I realized she and I devoured books for the same reason. Not for entertainment or even enlightenment. It was for escape. She dealt with the loss of her husband and her own home by escaping into books, and I dealt with the loss of