One day my mom simply put the mink coat in a plastic bag, stuffed the bag into a box and shipped it to me. She lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., where she has no needof a calf-length fur in the eight weeks that pretend to be winter, and the mink had become something of a reprimand: Why did she no longer live the kind of life that required a fur coat?

Not an easy question to answer, so she sent it to me, to do with as I wished. Selling it was the obvious choice, but not the easy one. Mom’s coat is one of those things that mattered to my parents enough for them to assume it would matter to their kids; it seemed callous to dump the mink the moment it arrived.

I hung it away until a friend warned me that mink sheds in the summer heat. A day later it took up residence in Macy’s fur storage vault until the following winter, when I found a furrier who trafficked in used fur coats.

It was only four blocks from Macy’s to the furrier, but by the time I arrived I had relived most of the happy mink moments of my youth, snuggling against my mom in the midst of a Chicago winter, inhaling the crisp, cold, dry smell of a sea of minks on an outing to the symphony. How proud my dad was to go into debt to buy my mother that coat; how proud she was to wear it.