Philippa Gordon, who shared a house with me in Kingsport and did nothing by halves, turned out to come from Bolingbroke. When she found out that I had been born there, she would not rest until I had come home with her for a visit.
So I walked up a street I had furnished in my head since I was a child, and found the house. It was small and shabby and down a side street, and it was still painted yellow. I cannot tell you how much that mattered.
The woman who lived there had known my parents. She said so as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. My father had red hair. My mother had my eyes, or I had hers. They were buried in one grave, and the school board had put up the stone, because they had been good teachers. She let me go upstairs, to the little east room where I was born, and I stood in it for a long time.
When I came down she gave me a bundle of letters. She had found them in a cupboard years before and never known what to do with them. There were about a dozen, my father’s and my mother’s, written to each other in the few short times they were apart. One was from my mother to my father, away for a few days, just after I was born. It is almost entirely about me.
I had told myself, all my childhood, that I came from nowhere. I came from a yellow house on a side street in Bolingbroke, and two people who wrote to each other, and were glad when I was born. It is astonishing how much weight a small packet of paper can carry.