Cedar and I make a start on dinner while Lacy takes a bath. Cedar loves pounding dough, and also the idea that adequate food can come from acts of acceptable violence, so we’re in the habit of making pizzas on Fridays. Eating the pizzas is secondary. He punches and thumps the dough around on the bench with as much noise as he can, sending puffs of flour up into the air, his hair, his eyelashes. He makes the dough balls into monsters, pokes eyes and mouths into them, flattens them with cartoon brutality.

Then, when the dough is ready and I call a halt and hand him a floured rolling pin, he rolls the pizza bases out, focusing on thinness, so their shapes are as random as three adjacent puddles.

While the oven heats, I relay the toppings from the fridge and line them up on the bench. With my mind focused on my knee as I pivot, a jar catches a corner of a school merit certificate of Cedar’s that’s attached to the fridge door, and it flips free of its magnet and drops to the floor. ‘Improving his listening skills in class in third quarter’ – that’s the merit that won it for him. The door is a crowded piece of real estate – I’m not sure anything’s come off it for months – but I re-site the certificate close to its original spot, near a carefully composed monster picture, blood dripping from its fangs, and postcards from Wade and Colleen to Cedar.

Any time they leave Anchorage he gets a postcard, and the fridge currently showcases three. One, from the look of it a vintage reproduction, features mid-century cars chicaning down Lombard Street in San Francisco. Beside it is a montage of Washington DC monuments ranging from the obvious – Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington himself – to the less high profile – the Cuban Friendship Urn, Nuns of the Battlefield, Generals Pulaski and Kosciuszko. I told Cedar I’d skied many times near the latter general’s mountain in Australia but, after that opening, there was no way of explaining it that came out plausible. I offered to google, but he detected the whiff of a teaching moment and declined. Above and to the right of the other two cards is a leaping Lipizzaner stallion with its rider’s coat-tails rising like beetle wings. The ‘Jewels of Europe’ Rhine cruise last spring was Wade and Colleen’s first ever trip outside North America, with a posse of fellow Rotarians who talked them into it.

After each trip, they also come back with their camera memory cards full of pictures, but the postcards are part of their relationship with Cedar, and highly anticipated here. For him, it is a marvel that a card can be bought and written somewhere across the country or the world and make an independent journey to our house, passing through all the hands and machines it does. Email seems far more logical, far more likely to succeed – send it into space, bounce it off a satellite or two, and here it is.