A few years ago, during one of my visits home, I noticed the photo was gone. At least the trailer was still parked out front. For more than 25 years it commanded the driveway of my parents’ home. You couldn’t squeeze through the front door of the house without bumping into its corrugated sides. Bees swarmed it in summer, drawn by the red blossoms from a nearby bottlebrush tree. In winter, holly berries rained down on the roof.

The family made four cross-country summer trips in that trailer. Six of us living in a space not 19 feet long. Whatever bickering we did at home in a four-bedroom house in San Diego was set aside, by necessity, in those potentially murderous close quarters. The trailer had a toilet and a shower, a stove and a refrigerator. The dining table folded down into a bed for my two sisters; the couch slid out into a master bed for my parents, and my little brother and I slept on a bunk suspended above them all. Being the oldest, I was entrusted with keeping him from rolling out of bed. I slept near the edge–a human guardrail.

With the four kids in the back of a station wagon and all the comforts of home towed behind, we rolled through barren stretches of Nevada and the endless cornfields of Illinois, listening to my father talk about building dams in the Civilian Conservation Corps and fighting the Japanese in WWII. I think the restlessness I feel now was born during those vacations when we’d sleep in a different state every night, drink Tang out of waxed paper cups and beg my parents to pull off at every roadside oddity advertised on Route 66, like two-headed snakes and five-legged cows. Even now, it doesn’t feel right if I’m not logging at least 3,000 miles on my car every summer.

Over the years, the trailer was pressed into service as a semipermanent home. My father once lived in it for six months rather than make a 70-mile commute to his new job. When it came time for me to go away to college, I lived in it, too, rather than pay the high cost of an apartment. I found a trailer court about 30 miles from the university, and my dad towed the trailer there, leveled it and left. I spent a year in it. I burned my first chicken in its oven. I learned how to live alone.

Eventually I married and had children of my own. When we came home for Christmas, my mother would parcel out the bedrooms among my children and those of my siblings. But I always volunteered to sleep in the trailer. Dad would insist it would be too cold. Mom would wonder why I wanted to sleep out there without running water and electricity. They didn’t understand that in the close darkness and narrow plywood bed of that trailer, I could still dream like a young girl, the future as limitless as an endless ribbon of interstate. I need things that remind me of the time when I was strong enough to hoist myself into its top bunk and everything I valued could fit into a few tiny closets.

A few years ago, my mother called to say my father was selling the trailer. At 75, he no longer had the energy to hitch it up and drive it anywhere. “It’s cluttering up the driveway,” Mom explained.

Why it would sit on its concrete pad for more than 25 years and not be perceived as “clutter” until now puzzled me at first.

But Dad had begun letting go of things that tied him to life. He’d cleaned out the garage, thrown away rusting old tools and gone over his will. He hadn’t taken the trailer out on the road in years. Maybe he didn’t want to be reminded of the energy he’d had as a younger man, when he could drive 10 hours straight and then play catch with us at the campground. Since last spring, when he was diagnosed with cancer, he’s been in and out of the hospital for surgery and chemo. He’s tired and hurting. Sometimes I think he’d rather forget the days when his kids were young and he was strong.

When I go home for the holidays, I’ll ask about that photo that used to hang in the hallway. The one with my sisters, my brother and I, the deep blue North Dakota sky and the shiny metal sides of our trailer.

Some things are too important to forget. It’s time to put that picture back on the wall.