I remember by remembering the various houses we lived in, the wooden mission house on stilts with windows barred by curled wire, cats catting under the porch swing. And after we moved north, the hours in the yard of the rental making-believe tea on tree stumps, marking fallen bamboo, biking the neighborhood labyrinth, clipping into the dialect. Next the white rowhouse in the valley ringed with mountains. This was our mother’s haven, and from the balcony her prayers fell on us like rain. Oh, did it rain, floods that seemed to purify. Back in America, a white-haired man let us stay in a house near the church. I tried to know it. I mapped the walls, even the closets into which I would crawl to cry. We bought a roomier house with a den for Dad, but by then I was spending my best hours in the cinderblock halls of school, then the shabby dorm in the beehive of college, mac and cheese from kettle-boiled sink water. Then nicer flats, rentals with friends, a husband, another apartment, a pandemic, a little mass-market blue two-bedroom. When we could travel again, we flew to the other side of the world to see my first house. Remodeled, it still held all the essentials, minus the cobra infestation that plagued the latest family of missionaries. It emerged like magic, framed by the branches of mature trees, floating, the house always seemed, on a square of air underneath, the porch swing squealing with the weight of me, remembering.