I start walking around the grounds, wondering if anything else will stir my memory. But mostly I feel like I’m a stranger in a strange land, almost like I’m trespassing even though I’ve been given full permission to tour outside. I find myself walking softly anyway, muffling the sound of my footfalls.

An hour later, my gloved hands are practically numb, and I feel that my dozens of nature shots could be found on any Mac screen saver in the world. I haven’t gained much from this experience except for a runny nose.

What did I expect would happen when I came here? That my dead mother would rise from the lake and grant me eternal happiness and health?

I’d hoped to spot a short-eared owl, to take a snapshot to commemorate my dad, who loved birds of prey, but clearly nature isn’t on my side. I put my camera in my bag and start climbing up the steep hill back to the house and decide it’s time to call a cab back. It’s too cold and gray, and I want to get back to the city before it’s dark.

But when I get to the back porch, I have no service. And even when I walk around the house to the front, I still have none.

I close my eyes and take deep inhalations, feeling the air enter my diaphragm and then exhaling it out in a cool stream. Everything’s fine. I won’t freeze to death. I’ll find service if I just begin to walk a little.

I circle the driveway a few times before heading back to the porch, and wave my phone above my head like my dad used to do. As if that ever worked. Not even a flicker of a bar. I’m completely stranded.

And then it occurs to me that there may be a landline inside, that if by some miracle I could get into the house, I could get out of here. The truth is, I want to go inside. I know from reading the description on the real estate agent’s site that there haven’t been any major internal renovations on the house since the eighties, which means that the floor plan of all the rooms, the halls, would be the same. Surely that would offer some sort of transcendental experience, a connection with my dead parents, my past?

I walk around the house again, looking for a basement entrance. My toes even in their wool socks are frozen into tiny icicles on my weary feet. Of course, there’s nothing open, so I make a last-ditch effort: I unlatch the porch’s screen door and turn the knob of the red inner wooden paneled door. It swings wide open, as if welcoming me.

So I step inside.