After my father was dead, and after my mother could no longer live independently, the task of dealing with their property fell to me, their only child. I remember, with an ache that never left me, the days I spent alone in their home, sorting through personal papers, deciding what to keep and what to send to the trash. I came upon old photographs, land deeds, bank statements, appliance manuals, grocery lists—everything that documented the lives they lived in what would soon be someone else’s house. I engaged an auctioneer, and by the end of the week, everything would be sold. Soon thereafter, I sold the house on contract and went back to my own life.

I never forgot, though, the days and nights my parents and I spent in that small frame house at 236 West Locust Street in Sumner, Illinois. In the autumn of the year, we picked up black walnuts that had fallen to the grass from the tree beside our garage. We raked our leaves onto a tarp and carried them to our garden where they would decompose and provide a natural fertilizer for next spring’s planting.

When the temperature dropped, my mother’s cooking fogged up the kitchen windows. I stood in the front room, watching for my father, eager to see him walking down the sidewalk, returning from time spent loafing uptown in Tubby’s Barber Shop, always carrying with him a new joke to tell. After supper, I carried the trash to our burn barrel along the garden’s edge and set it afire. I listened to the dogs barking from their pen behind the garage. I smelled the must of dead leaves, and if someone had burned some earlier, the scent would be in the air and wisps of smoke would rise from the drainage ditches that ran along the edge of the street.

On Friday nights, we listened to a high school basketball game on the radio. We sat around our kitchen table, and my mother popped corn and sliced apples and opened bottles of Pepsi-Cola. At ten o’clock, she turned on the television in our family room so she could watch the evening news. On exceptionally cold nights, I stood in front of our gas heating stove, letting it warm my back.

Then we all lay down to sleep. I woke at seven o’clock to the sound of a State Farm Insurance jingle on the radio. My mother was up, preparing breakfast, and soon she’d call to me to get out of bed. The day stretched out in front of us. That day and the one after it, and on and on, all of us blind to the fact that the time would come when there would be no more days in that house.

Which brings me to consider the last time we occupied a space that was important to us, and how that might provide a writing prompt, either in fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. Maybe, like me, you’ll recall a house where you once lived, or maybe you’ll remember a workspace, or a classroom, or a coffee shop. Any place that mattered to you once upon a time will do the trick. Write something—poetry or prose—that has to do with the last time you were there. Why was it hard to leave? Did the leaving involve also saying goodbye to someone? What didn’t you know when you finally left? What was waiting for you in the days and months and years beyond this last time? Let the writing take you wherever it wants to go. Maybe you’ll remember a love that has gradually ebbed. Maybe you’ll find yourself filled with resentment or rage. Maybe you’ll smile sweetly, thinking of all you left behind. Maybe you’ll forgive yourself or someone else. Maybe you’ll remember the life you had, and the people who shared it with you. Let the details do the work. Start a sentence with the words, “The last time I. . . .” See what looking back can tell you.

In many ways, though it’s been nearly forty years since my parents were alive, in my memory my mother is cooking supper in our kitchen, and I’m standing at the front window, waiting for the first sign of my father coming home.

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