I had moved past it through the long practice of building things that were complete in themselves, that did not require external validation to be what they were.
The house was real whether my parents saw it or not.
But I wanted them to see it.
Not for the house’s sake. For something older than that. The part of me that is still the daughter and not just the architect, the part that sits alongside the professional self and the accomplished self and the self that has learned not to need what was withheld, and that still, despite everything, reaches.
I invited them for Christmas.
I started preparing three weeks in advance.
I found my father’s coffee at the third roaster I called. It was a specific Ethiopian blend he had been ordering for years, and it was harder to find in the mountains than you would think, and it took me forty-five minutes of phone calls, but I found it. I found my mother’s orange marmalade, which she had been complaining was impossible to get locally, at a specialty food shop in Black Mountain that I drove to on a Thursday afternoon specifically for the marmalade.
