San Mateo, Calif.

This year, I set aside a day of vacation to unpack the car, do laundry, and ready to go back to work. Those tasks left me a few hours to begin dealing with the papers and photos I had brought back with me; I had sorted through most of Dad’s papers and photos while in Massachusetts, but I still had a couple of boxes to sort through, scanning those that were worth saving.

I started with the easiest task. While in Massachusetts, I had divided Dad’s photos up among his three children; if a photo featured one of us prominently, I gave it to that child; and the other photos I divided randomly and evenly among us. The easiest task was this: take my share of the photos, sort them in chronological order, and put them into a photo album. That took me a couple of hours, and I showed Carol the photo album, and then I looked through it again on my own. When I had done all this, I was pretty sad — the worst part was looking at the photos of my mother the year before she died; I had forgotten how bad she looked — but I was nevertheless glad I had done it. I realized, too, that most of these photos just sat in boxes for years and years, for decades even, and we never looked at them. Now even if I don’t want to look through that photo album ever again, at least I have the option to do so, and that feels like a minor accomplishment.

And that, I guess, is the real end to this summer’s road trip.