Aunt June was the family ghost—a spinster who lived in the same cramped Boston apartment for 40 years, wore moth-eaten cardigans, and muttered about the weather like it owed her money. When she died, my mom handed me a key. “Clear out her place. Donate whatever’s left.” The apartment smelled of stale tea and ink. I started with the closet, where I found a steamer trunk buried under yellowed newspapers. Inside were 31 notebooks, each labeled with a year: 1965–1996. I opened one. Pressed between pages were train tickets to Marrakech, a dried orchid from Bangkok, and a sketch of a Venetian canal at dawn. “April 12, 1973,” she’d written. “Rode a camel today. It spat on me. Worth it.” Aunt June, who’d supposedly never left Massachusetts, had circled the globe. Her journals detailed hitchhiking through Iran in ’68, studying flamenco in Barcelona, and smuggling banned books into Prague under a fake name. “Told Mother I was at a church retreat,” she scribbled in 1971. “If she knew I was dancing in a Madrid basement, she’d faint. Or join me.” Beneath the notebooks lay a silk scarf wrapped around a Kodak camera. Developed film inside showed June—young, fierce, her hair a wild cloud—posing with activists in Paris, fishermen in Crete, a group of women laughing on a Nairobi rooftop. My hands trembled. The aunt I’d pitied for her “small life” had lived a hundred. I called my mother. “Did you know?” Silence. Then: “She tried to tell me once. I said she was reckless. We never spoke about it again.” That night, I booked a one-way ticket to Lisbon with June’s ’75 journal as my guide. In her margin notes, she’d scribbled: “The best secrets aren’t meant to stay buried. They’re compasses.” At a café in Alfama, I met an elderly guitarist who recognized June’s photo. “Saudade,” he said, tapping his heart. “She understood longing.” Now, I write to her in my own journal: “Today, I got lost in Istanbul. You’d have loved it.”