We have these vertical blinds in our living room window, next to the front door. Three years ago on my birthday, during our first year out here, my dad and I were heading out to a thrift store. He would go look through the books and CDs and I’d end up in shirts and sundresses. As we were leaving, one of the blinds on the end caught the breeze of the open door and got caught as I was closing it. My dad made a wry comment that made me laugh. It was so him: quick, quiet, dry. Every time I walk out the front door now and the end blind blows into the door jamb, my dad is there with me. Quickly. Quietly.

I think of his left hand. It was always very busy, that hand. Fidgety. In the hospital, three weeks ago, I held that hand. First, because I wanted to; second, because his IV was in that arm and he continued to bend it such that the line would get interrupted. The nurse taught me how to restart the IV when that happened so that the alarm beep would stop and the drip could continue. But I held that hand happily, firmly, which was so gnarled with 97 years of living: golf club gripping, art tool holding, Agatha-his-cat petting, martini mixing, daughter tending hand. Now I was tending it and him. He fought me on it a little those three weeks ago but in a way that was more his body than his mind. But my grip was strong. Gentle but determined.

I have a very busy left hand too. During meditation, I’ll be sitting and noticing how my index and thumb fingers are rubbing against each other. I’ll scold them a little as if they’re separate entities from me. They don’t listen.

He was always amazed at how much stuff D and I fit into our back patio: A small pool, a table that sat three, a chaise longue, some small tables, and plants. Four weeks ago, I was replacing the dead plants with ones I had high hopes for. Some sturdier varieties that love triple-digits(!?!?). When he called to ask how to fix his TV, I stood out in back in the place I was putting even more stuff and thought A) He’s unplugged everything again, and B) He’ll think it’s so funny that we’re fitting even more stuff into this back patio. At that point, there was an idea to bring him over to ours for my birthday the next week. He didn’t get a chance to see the new plants but every time I step out there, I can hear him saying “I don’t know how you fit so much back here.” That makes me smile because he’s here.

Last week I went and picked up his ashes. The wildness of that I was not prepared for. Surprising how something you’ve planned, even thought about, for a long time, is so exactly different in the doing of it. I wasn’t so much sad as surprised and a little amazed that walking into this place that is two blocks from where I live and that I’ve passed literally hundreds of times and even thought to myself, hrm, someday I’ll probably be making use of that place, well now I was walking in for that very reason. But yet, I was handed a black carry bag with an 8-by-12-ish gray plastic box, which had a clear plastic bag filled with what used to be my dad inside. Really, actually, the vessel that carried my dad for 97 years. That busy left hand, the fingers placing collage material, the arms executing a golf swing, that dry wit and kindness and flares of all other emotions too tucked inside the whole carriage of it. How was it that I was walking the two blocks home with all that in the bag with the box and the clear plastic enclosure with ash inside of that? I put it on the shelf and stared at it. What was the point of it, I wondered. I had a ceramic decorative thing with a lid that he’d had sitting in his dining room that I planned to place the ashes/him in. I worried that in the transferring from the bag some of him would blow away. That I wouldn’t quite get the plastic bag situated so that it would be a clean switchover. But then I just went out in the back, sat on the blue chair from his porch that lives here now in our just-enough backyard, and did it. Our boy cat, Desi, watched, caught a few drifting ashes in his mug. Overall, it worked. I was maybe so intent on not messing it up that I might not have felt as much as I thought I would. But there it is: He’s living in the moments least expected: my left hand, our verticle blinds, the colorful backyard, in my heart, in my soul.