When we enter the garden gate, the newly painted facade looks bright even in the dim weather. Edith says, “You boys better do something about that front door.” The dogs appear, all wiggle and charm—like us, on their best behavior. My father adores them, watching them with a frank, unclouded curiosity I’ve never seen in his face before. It’s as if he’s never seen a dog. And then it’s as if he’s never seen a house like this one. In fact, I guess he hasn’t: we tour the little two-hundred-year-old rooms, with their low ceilings and exposed beams, their proudly cracked plaster and odd angles and old furniture.

Edith says, “Well, you boys have a lot of work to do.” But my father, who has just been looking all around with that new, unguarded curiosity, says, “Gee, gee.” Pause. “This is neat.”

We are all a bit shy, a little tentative, and a little startled at how pleasant the visit is. We drive to a favorite beach of mine, Head of the Meadow, a wild strip of high dunes above the Atlantic where the waves break twice, once on a sandbar a ways out to sea, then again as they hurry in to shore. Sand and sky seem immense there, the wide curve endless. It’s the last outpost of the continent, nothing but waves between us and Greenland, and the wind always blows in from the rimless expanses chill and fresh, with a tang of the wild.

Edith brings her purse and ties a scarf around her head; my father takes off his shoes and socks and carries them in one hand while we walk the path over a low dune. Paul makes sure they’re comfortable walking on the sand; he looks so handsome to me, in his heavy new black sweater, in the shore light. I have the sensation of noticing, all over again, his open and generous face. We step down from the sandhill to the empty slope of shore. My father watches the slap of wave turn to a quick sheet of foam that hurries up the sand and back again, pulled under the dark advancing curve of the next wave, gulls drifting and settling, a racing troop of plovers. He looks simply amazed by it all. I don’t think he has any desire to go closer, or to move on, or to do anything just now; his face is full of plain delight.