North Slope

The house looked smaller, which I had been told to expect, and the pines looked bigger, which I had not. They stood behind it in their careful rows like an audience that had arrived early and was waiting, politely, for something to begin.

I hadn’t been back in twenty years. My grandfather and I spoke on the phone on birthdays, and once, when I was in college, he mailed me a pinecone in a padded envelope with no note. I kept it on my desk for a decade. I never asked him why.