Winona.

Most of the drive up to Winona, MN, my father’s and grandparents’ hometown, from northern Illinois is through Wisconsin, but then you cross the Mississippi near the end and drive the last 20 minutes along the river with those famous bluffs on your left and the river, which is very wide there, on the right. It’s beautiful, and I always wonder why my parents—who both loved that area and talked about it a lot, especially comparing it to Indiana which they hated but spent most of their adults lives in—never moved back there. I know people don’t always think of their lives as so easily mobile, but why would people spend their whole lives in a place they disliked so strongly?

Winona is a small but not tiny town on an isthmus between the river and a long skinny lake. Both shores are public park. I’ve had these wedding photos of my grandparents since Lenore died and I took her scrapbooks. They were taken in the park on the lake, along which is a road lined with mansions. My dad says it was a popular place to take photos, with the fancy houses as backdrop. I thought there was a good chance the house in the photos was still there, and my cousin Debra and I found it easily. I tried lamely to replicate grandfather Ed’s pose. I don’t have anything close to his charisma and style.