I am dancing in the artic to the music of an old cassette player. I am tap dancing to old tapes of show tunes that were recorded decades ago and labeled in my grandmother's handwriting. She is dancing with me on the cedar floor, our heads nearly grazing the low beams above us. Our feet and arms move in tandem, and our tap shoes hit the floor, clack-cla-clack-clack-clack, well rehearsed and perfectly synchronized. Occasionally I look over at her and smile. Of course, I know that she died in 1984 from ovarian cancer, and that I was born in 1989. I never actually met my grandmother.

  Her name was Gerry Lou Rose, and in 1971 she bought the house in Western Massachusetts that now belongs to my mother, and will one day belong to me. It was built on 80 acres of farmland in 1703; it is small and drafty. There is a big red barn next to the house that tilts 30 degrees to the right and is filled with gardening tools and a tractor that rarely sees use. Surrounded for miles by dirt roads and quiet forests, the closest neighbors are the deer and the rabbits that nest year-round in the coves surrounding the pond. There is no street address or house number; we keep a P.O. box in the general store of a town 10 miles away.

  Gerry Lou is buried less than a quarter mile from the house, in a clearing on the far side of a blueberry field. The site is reached by following one of the ancient stone walls that weave throughout the land. There is a small birdbath, a bench and several wind chimes that hang from musky pines trees. A rose bush continues to bloom each August, despite its old age, in brilliant pink buds. Whenever I walk to see Gerry Lou with my grandfather or my mother, the chimes herald our arrival. I have witnessed innumerable one-sided conversations, full of questions that go unanswered. "How are you, Gerry Lou? Do you think of me often?" Neither my grandfather nor my mother seems unsatisfied with the silence, nodding thoughtfully in gentle understanding.

  The kitchen is filled with grocery list and phone books in which she wrote. There are forgotten photographs in closet drawers that she sent to casting agencies when she was a stage actress. I have spent every summer of my life at that house, looking through scrapbooks and carrying around old sets of her keys, forging a relationship that did not rely on the memories shared by relatives.

  My favorite place in the house is the secluded room in the back of the attic. Old manuscripts, books on acting, tap shoes and tape cassettes line the shelves. Cedar walls prevent moth damage, and their scent fills my memories. On countless afternoons, away from everyone else, I have retreated to that room and spent time with Gerry Lou. I have tried on her clothes from the old coat racks and posed in the mirror, like she had in pictures form off-Broadway performances of Madame Butterfly. She has coached me on the art of lipstick application and showed me how to bevel my leg to give the appearance of extension. I spent the summer after second grade learning the final scene from Romeo and Juliet, and reenacted it, in melodramatic gestures, with a collapse on the living room carpet in front of my extended family. While my brother and cousins laughed at my shameless extroversion, something entirely different radiated from the older members of my family. I could see in their watery eyes the reflection of my grandmother looking back at me. I swelled with pride at this, my greatest achievement. I was my grandmother's granddaughter.

  Communicating with the dead is not as obvious or as terrifying as horror movies portray it to be. There are no pale figures, no audible conversations or inexplicable slamming of doors. The presence of loved ones is kinetic, flowing, as subtle as raised hairs on the back of my neck and the pleasant lingering sensation I feel when I try on Gerry Lou's clothes and tap to her cassettes. Objects are the only medium between the living and the dead; they transcend mortality and preserve legacies. My favorite place is my grandmother's favorite place, the house where I can feel her most tangibly through all the possessions that she left behind.