By the turn of the century my grandmother's family had homesteaded in Minnesota, and she was born there in a log cabin; within five years her father had constructed a 'big house' for his brood, as well as a post office and store. He named the whole complex after his first-born son. My father too dreamed of building his own home, and he and my mother moved after their marriage into a tiny place known as the 'pink house,' where they began a painstaking renovation. But work slowed as he began to sicken, and he died without completing the job. Within five years of his death the state had seized the property to make room for a new freeway. As children, we devised a game in memoriam for our house: whenever we rode that route we would try to guess the exact moment at which we were crossing over what had been our living room, or, depending on the lane we were in, our back yard. We lost those bearings too as years passed. But Leonard, Minnesota, can still be found on the map.