‘Anyway,’ she says, a quiver in her voice. She clears her throat. ‘We collected things, these little pieces of history that fascinated us, but we collected too many. I did a course in picture framing –’ she waves her arm to indicate the shelved timber and glass and the woodworking bench – ‘and turned out to be quite good at it. We set up our business on the web – small historical objects with a few lines of history in presentation frames. It’s a nice product. I find Etsy is good. I don’t suppose you can sell your toolboxes there, but it’s ideal for something small with a handmade element.’

‘And ancestry DNA testing is, like, a hundred dollars now.’ I was on a news site over breakfast and saw that on a sidebar ad. ‘That must generate some business, when people find out specific details of where they’re from and who they’re related to.’

‘Yes,’ she says, with some force. ‘Yes. You’ve got it. Walter was right onto that. He had plans to develop that market. He had his DNA done himself, you know. The blood test.’ She says it as if I’m now a co-conspirator. ‘His aunt once told him she suspected the Bakers had a distant Native American ancestor from their early timber-milling days in Maine. Walter wanted it to be true – one of the Wabanaki nations, he figured – but you know what? English, Irish, Scottish and two per cent from Ghana or Ivory Coast. In Africa. You can imagine the googling that went on when that news came through. We’ll never know for sure, but the best guess is it was an Akan slave, taken from West Africa. You remember Obama’s speech – I don’t know if you saw it, it was early in his first term – when he said Michelle carries the blood of slaves and slave-owners? It was on TV and Walter got out of his seat and said, “That’s me!” It had to be the truth. He wrote the First Lady and received a very thoughtful reply.’

‘What are you going to do with it all when you move?’ There must be hundreds of items in the boxes, still unframed and unsold. For a second I picture myself in the very spot where I’m standing, sawdust underfoot, pencil in hand, measuring up a frame for some exotic piece of the past.

‘It’s coming with me,’ she says. ‘I’ve found the right place, a retirement community in Anchorage. They have workshop space, but it’s under-utilised. I can set up there. They want me to. I can train other residents in framing and, when I pass, leave them the equipment and whatever items remain. I have more than I’ll ever live to work on, and I can’t imagine the market for them stopping any time soon. That way if I drop dead all of a sudden, it will all still be used. It’ll be better there. If I fell here, right here on this floor, who would know? It was different when it was the two of us.’ Her expression changes, clouds over. ‘It’s Walter’s things I’m not certain what to do with. The collected pieces that were never commercial.’ She breathes out and her shoulders drop. ‘I have to do some kind of inventory first. I haven’t done that yet. I haven’t even got them out and looked at them. They still have Walter on them. He was the last person to touch them. I don’t want to take that touch off them, but I guess the time is coming.’