A Cache of Letters: An Excerpt from When the River Ice Flows, I Will Come Home by Elisa Brodinsky Miller
May 8, 2020
By the rules of the retirement center in Bloomfield, Connecticut where my father had lived, the family was allotted five working days after his death to clear out the belongings from his cottage. My brother and I had agreed: we wouldn’t save any furniture, just the china, the stemware, the samovar, and the contents of his study. It all was to go into a storage unit near his home in Wallingford, CT. Together, later, we three siblings would sort through it all. Each of us would take what we wanted and we’d toss the rest. We doubted there would be any scraps between us; we three are much too different. Exactly a year after our father’s death, I traveled from Seattle, my sister came from Charlotte, to stay with my brother and his wife.