I’m told my father planted a cherry tree in the front yard, between the house and street, not long before he went to sea, before I was born. That tree is in this picture, taken four years later by someone whose name I was never told, except that it wasn’t my father, who I never met. Yes, that’s my mother, sitting by my father’s tree, and me by her side. We’d just come back from the country, a trip to see my father’s mother, which is why we have clean clothes after everything was taken in a flash. It’s also why we weren’t in the house when it vanished and the tree was burned black and bare that morning. After this was taken, we went back to the country. I didn’t get the sickness while we were home, another thing I don’t understand. Perhaps it was because I was too young to understand grief. My mother mourned my father, our house and city, the cherry tree, and she fell so terribly sick, and left me to grow into an old man on the family farm, far enough away from Nagasaki to have lived, but not so far to leave my ghosts there.