In an uncannily incandescent time when night skies still twinkled

and days were so clear you could see past horizons, my brother and I foraged for trilobites and stashed them along with crinoid stems and glass taxidermy eyes in cigar boxes in our bedrooms. At dusk, we bottled fireflies, then let them go. We collected words, stored them in every nook and cranny, released them as well. Webster’s in the toilet! we’d shout when one of us slouched off upstairs to the bathroom, the dictionary’s home in its pride of place on a rickety three-legged stool next to a potted snake plant. We laughed learning words like shoogly and collywobbles and filed them away for future use. Dad wrote long words like desacetylmethylcolchicine on the hall blackboard for us to memorize. Mother taught us to iron shirts, collars first, and introduced us to perspective as we drove past fields of corn on Sunday country drives in the Plymouth. Back home, she showed us how to draw buildings with a point of view. We curled up like pill bugs in the living room with our pencils and rulers and drawing pads, McCarthy banging away on the Philco TV. Father quivered and jumped and Mother swore like when she untangled hangers or knots in thread. We peppered our meals with questions about oaths and loyalty, swallowed answers our parents stammered and stumbled over as we dunked yeasty rolls into stew. After dinner, my brother ran upstairs, slammed his door. I rinsed and Mother washed, warbling like Dinah Shore. Father wiped, then sawed, drilled and sanded in the basement, making toys for neighborhood children. Sometimes he left to deliver babies. Cloudy days we played Scrabble, checkers and chess. We sulked when we lost, fidgeted when our parents told us, Mother’s eyes red, Father frowning, subpoena in hand, not to worry about bad things, or how long they could last.