This is the second part of a very personal story. If you haven’t seen Part I, you can catch up here.

His face lit up when he saw me come around the corner. “Hello, Uncle Richard,” I had said. “Can I give you a kiss?”

“I always like kisses from pretty girls,” he’d said, so I kissed his cheek and he grasped my hand and I laughed a little. He caught his breath.

“When you laugh,” he said, holding onto me hard, “you sound just like your mother.”

It knocked the wind out of me, too, a little. It always does.

“I’ve heard that before,” I said.

“It’s a good thing,” he told me. “We miss her so much.” His eyes misted briefly. “I miss all of ‘em. You know my Beverly passed.”

“I do,” I said, and suddenly the little farmhouse had seemed to swell around me with the ghosts of all our losses. My great-grandparents, gone before I knew them, but in my mind’s eye I could still imagine them at the long smorgasbord table in the front room of the house, welcoming their family and friends to the annual Christmas feast. Their five children, all indelibly a part of my own story with the exception of my grandmother’s twin, Doe, who died so long ago I have no memory of when. All their spouses, who seamlessly wove themselves into the fabric of the family and became part of this vast net of safety and heritage, gone — with the exception of Uncle Richard, who sat holding my hand and talking about living to see 100. My grandparents. My parents. So many others who had been part of our shared story, and now moved around me, filling the rooms with the enormity of memory.

The scope of it choked me. Uncle Richard peered up at me, and he knew me, but I understood that his wise old eyes just saw my mother. I wondered if the ghosts of this house and this land haunted him, or kept him company.

Standing later by the damp hole in the soft earth, glancing up at the house where he waited while we all gathered to return the ashes of four of those ghosts to the land, I felt simultaneously wrapped in the blanket of family, and as alone as I have ever felt.

“Thank you,” I said, to the assembled cousins and aunts and uncles. “Thank you for welcoming them back home.” They didn’t have to. My mother and father had certainly not done as good a job as they might have at staying in touch with all “the folks back home” after they left to make a new life six hours away, in a new state that might as well have been a foreign country to them. The circle of half-familiar faces might just as well have decided we weren’t welcome to bring their ashes back here, or might have declined to show up and stand alongside us in a muddy field on a muggy, stormy Saturday, listening to us fumble our way through inelegant goodbyes.

But, I realized, feeling the steadfastness of that small group of people as if it rose from the ground and through me, like water through the roots of a tree, my parents were part of their stories, too. And so it was natural to them, to open a scar in the land and take my parents and grandparents back.

Home really is the place where they have to take you in.

When we all added our shovels full of dirt to the hole, sealing up that wound in the earth was something like healing. My mother’s cousin said to my uncles, “Don’t worry about this. We’ll come on down here later and neaten things up, and we’ll keep coming to tend to it. We’ll take care of it for you.” Some things are meant to leave a scar, but you do your best to soften the edges, anyway.

After, sitting at a restaurant for lunch, I looked across the table at my cousin, my uncle’s son, who I don’t know. We were supposed to be part of each other’s stories in the way all these assembled members of the previous generation were; supposed to grow up together, supposed to have shared memories and language. Circumstances intervened and we grew up apart. When we saw one another at the house, before, we’d hugged as if we felt it was the natural thing to do, but we had tripped over the words: “Nice to see you/Nice to meet you.” It had been almost 40 years.

Then, a nudge at my elbow. My mother’s cousin John had a pile of photographs to share. We started the slow process of passing them around the table, and the fading images and John’s words, filling in the blanks for me, were like earth rising into the fathomless hole that stretched between me, my sister, and my cousin; this generation of family who were lost to the land and lost to each other. Together, poring over each new black-and-wide record of our ancestors, we saw our great-grandfather as a young man for the first time. We saw people who came before him, even, before the grand gamble of passage to Ellis Island made this luncheon party possible. We saw my grandmother and her siblings rise into being, small and then bigger and then grown. There were people and moments and memories we’d never known, and we learned them together and they became ours.

My cousin had questions; we answered them. We asked “Do you know about the time…?” and he didn’t, so we told him. We, who had driven through this town all day long with moments of recall coming in startling clarity — Silver Street, the Congregational Church, the building where our great-aunt had lived and died in a pretty little apartment, Salmon Brook Park, the pizza parlor where my infant sister first ate garlic bread (still in operation and looking much the same), house after house after house after house where people we knew and loved had lived and welcomed us and become part of the fabric of our memories — we estranged natives of this place sketched out the guidebook in stories for our cousin who had never known it as his rightful home.

I hadn’t been back in probably a dozen years. For my sister, it had been longer. Everything we thought had connected us to this place was, arguably, gone; and yet it was still ours. My great-grandfather’s youthful face called to me from a distant photograph. His son’s eyes met mine, from his grandson’s face. My cousin’s smile, at age 42, pulled at the edges of a memory — him, at five, grinning next to me on a porch somewhere.

My mother’s laugh welled in my throat. I pulled out my phone and showed John the side-by-side I had, of a back-to-school photo of my younger son next to an old black-and-white of my grandfather, from my living room wall. “Oh, wow,” he breathed, taking in the resemblance. “And who’s that?” He pointed at the black-and-white, where a baby nestled in my grandfather’s lap.

I pointed down the table to my uncle, now a grandfather himself. He had stood by the burial site before and gazed out at all the faces surrounding him, saying, “We were so lucky to have had each other…and here we stand with part of the next generation, who have not had what we had here. It’s our fault. We’re the ones who left.” And I had shuffled my feet, looking at the damp ground, shoulder to shoulder with my sister, unable to meet my cousin’s unfamiliar eyes. The hole stretched deeper and wider beneath us than could be seen with the naked eye.

Since my parents died, I think my sister and I have been on a journey to identify Home. Certainly we shared the sense of “home” having been the house where we grew up, in the Capital District of New York State. And when we met there to clean out 35 years’ worth of memories and get the place ready to sell, it was still home — a house so familiar to us that we could have navigated it blindfolded, streets we could drive with ease, friends and neighbors who greeted us no matter how many years we’d both lived away, brought meals, offered help, held our hands. Yet with the house sold, I think of that town, and I wonder if it still holds a place for me. Similarly, I know, both my sister and I think of our early childhood address in Buffalo, the “home” both our parents loved most of all. We can remember the street address and telephone number, remember the smell of the hallways at our beloved elementary school, recall the names and faces of close neighbors (the Lyons across the street, the Smeaks three doors down in the red house). When we left that house, my sister confessed to me, she had written inside her closet: “This is my house forever,” and signed her name. At the age of eight, I was jealous of her forethought, resentful that I had not also thought to weave a magic spell to bind myself to our precious home despite my father’s company transfer across the state.

It turns out I didn’t need a magic spell to bind me to my home. That was, and is, our house forever. We live there in memory just as the ghosts of my ancestors laid their smorgasbord table in my mind’s eye as I stood in their farmhouse. The house that saw us off to proms and college and my wedding belongs to us, too, and to my children, who were welcomed and loved inside its walls. The many homes of our grandparents, aunts, and uncles, dotted across rural New England, also belong to us. And so does the farmhouse. And so does the land.

It’s not just that home is where people have to take you in. It’s that home is where your stories happened, and if you’re lucky, when you go back there, the people who open the door know some of those stories, too. Home is where you weave the spell of eternity simply by living, and by loving, and by remembering. And when you tell those stories, you reopen the door, no matter where you are. It’s a place, and it’s people. It’s a location, and it’s memory. It’s both fixed and transient, and if you’re very, very lucky, it’s a gift you can give to someone else just by asking, “Have I ever told you about…?”

In the neighborhood I currently call home, we have lots of old houses, and lots of old trees. Sidewalks sometimes buckle under the pressure of the root systems; homeowners do battle with their encroachment on gardens, fences, and sewer pipes. Many years ago, a workman digging up a problematic bit of my yard wiped his face and told me philosophically, “The thing about roots is you never know how far and wide they can spread.”

I suppose you never do.