At least the first time that we went to visit my dad in prison, we stayed with my Aunt Amy and Uncle Nick. We lived in Connecticut, and my dad was incarcerated in New Jersey, the state he was originally from and where his parents and brother still lived.

There are a lot of things that I acknowledge made my experience more privileged than the vast majority of children with incarcerated parents: my mom was a stay at home mom and continued to be while my dad was away, my maternal grandmother was supportive and often around our house, a few of my friends had parents who would help take care of me, my parents didn’t lose our house, we still definitely had healthcare, and we were able to visit my dad every other week since we had a car and it was only a four hour drive.

I’m not sure if he was placed in New Jersey due to some amount of compassion by the judge, or if it is common to be that close to home, but I’m very thankful for it.

When we stayed with my aunt and uncle, they lived in a beige townhome on a fake pond. Upstairs they had a spare bedroom with bunkbeds, which were covered with stuffed animals we weren’t supposed to play with and which were flanked by coffee tables covered in Disney snow globes that weren’t allowed to touch. Everyone collects something, and I’m still confused by the choices a lot of people make of what to collect.

Before my dad was incarcerated, we had never stayed with my aunt and uncle, usually staying with my paternal grandparents whenever we’d visit New Jersey. I’m not sure how it was determined that we did not stay with them, but it’s a conversation that I would never want to be a part of, even though I do agree with where the decision landed that we would stay with my aunt and uncle instead.

All I remember about our stay with my aunt and uncle is that my uncle shared ice cream with his dog using the same spoon he was using for himself and that in the morning I asked my aunt if she thought it would be funny if I called her Uncle Amy and my uncle Aunt Nick. She told me I was being annoying, and we stopped staying there.

Instead we stayed at a hotel, something like a Holiday Inn or Residence Inn type place, that was only a couple of minutes from the prison, the extra cost being justified by whatever amount of stress was saved in being close and having our own space, which my brother and I would sometimes use to jump between and hide behind our hotel beds until the front desk would call to tell us we were being too loud.

We didn’t always visit my dad as just the three of us. Multiple times my Uncle Nick would drive down, bringing the excitement of getting to see him while joining us on our adventures outside of the prison, like going to get ice cream from the McDonalds where the cashier who had really intricate nail designs that I liked and who would make sure we got fudge on the bottom and top of our sundae cups, or the church where everything was dark colored wood and the mass was still held in Latin, or the bowling alley where they played animations after each roll, something I’d never seen but thought was so cool. I find it even more cool that these animations are somehow still ubiquitous and the exact same twenty-three years later as the ones that so impressed me in 1997.

At least a few times, my maternal grandmother would come down with us, and at least once around Christmas, my paternal grandparents were there as well, showing up with a garbage bag full of gifts, which Michael returned to Toys R Us in exchange for cash.

The place we most often visited (besides the prison where my dad was), with or without other guests, was a colonial village next to the hotel, Wheaton Village, which we would go to either before or after visiting Francis.

It felt like it was always winter when we visited, I think because it was, and we’d walk around the completely empty colonial village, stopping for a break from the cold by going into drafty buildings where they had a replica printing press or a candle making set up. The exhibits were either manned by a person in a turtle neck or were just empty, leaving the place feeling like a drab ghost town.

Outside of the exhibits, we would play on a completely empty playground, which was metal unlike our wooden playgrounds in Connecticut. It was always cold enough that the monkey bars and ladder rungs would feel like they were burning your hands, even though they were doing the opposite. We’d also feed ducks and my mom would make us laugh by naming them.

Wheaton Village is one of those places that I have universally positive memories of.

For all three of us, our favorite part of the colonial village was the glass blowing studio, a cavernous warehouse-like space with the incessant white noise of fans or motors from the multiple kilns from which people would pull out glowing, molten orbs attached to metal rods, blowing into the other ends of the tubes and hammering and twisting ever more delicately until the molten turned to glass. I’d sit on the edge of the stadium seating they had set up, with my arms and legs hanging out of the bars, observing as the glass become chandeliers, vases, or decorative stemware, seeing molten turn to clear and then somehow suddenly have a color that was there from the start. The glass studio may have been the only building in the village that had heat, and it compensated for the rest of the buildings by being excessively warm and constantly feeling like you were under a blanket.

To coincide with our last visit to my dad (which may have been when we picked him up; I really don’t remember), my mom signed up to do a glass blowing lesson where she’d get to make a paperweight, the glass blown object that most closely resembled the glowing orb that came out of the kiln. We were all excited to go that day (still not sure if it was because it was also when we would be picking up my dad), and when we told the woman at admission what we were doing, she asked my mom if she was wearing contacts and warned that you couldn’t wear them while glass blowing because they would melt into your eyes and have to be surgically removed. I am still very uncomfortable by the idea of contact lenses.

One inside, my brother stood at the railing while I sat with my legs dangling through the bars, and we watched as my mom took a glowing orb and with the help of an instructor turned it into a green paperweight (she didn’t get to choose the color) filled with a neatly organized explosion of bubbles. We had to wait until the next day to pick it up.

Back home we kept the paperweight, along with paperweights my brother bought at the gift shop in a curio cabinet in the formal living room, acting as a reminder of the set of memories my brother, mom, and I created on our own and which she went out of her way to make sure were positive despite the circumstances.