This week’s project: clean out the basement. Again. To be fair (to us), the last time I did this was in 2015 when I was alone as everyone else cavorted in Poland. It’s a bit more time-consuming this time around because everything has a layer of concrete dust on it from having our windows replaced. Why didn’t they clean it up? Why did I raise hell about them not cleaning it up?

In today’s work, I made a few discoveries, including several pictures stuck in bins that had nothing to do with photography, memorabilia, or anything similar. One was my fifth-grade class picture.

I look at the faces of my classmates and realize I can remember more names than I would have expected. Granted, I went with most of these kids from first grade through high school graduation, but still, my last memory of them is of them seven years older.

In fifth grade I got in trouble for cheating. We traded test papers with a peer, marked it, then went back over it with our own tests to make sure there were no mistakes in the marking. Lo and behold, Brett, who’d graded mine, had made more mistakes than he’d gotten right — so naive was I that I didn’t think. So little experience did I have cheating that I didn’t even give such things as thought. How do you cheat without making it obvious? I had no idea. I still remember the conference with the teacher and both my parents. I don’t remember the punishment; I remember the tension of the meeting.

I look over the faces, remembering names of kids, then look at the teachers. There’s Dr. Hale on the far right. Beside her? I can’t remember. At the other end is Mr. Eades, the first male teacher I ever had. And beside him? My mother.

“How did Nana get in that picture?” I think she was a class mother or something like that. And then it happened — I realized that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do most: ask her about it.

How many times will this happen? Doubtlessly, countless.