Here we are in the fall of the year, a time that always takes me back to Sunday afternoons when my father, at ease on his day of rest, suggested we go for a ride in the country. My mother in the front seat and I in the back, he pointed his Delmont 88 down the gravel roads of Lukin Township. Sometimes we went to our farm, the house unoccupied now that we’d moved into town. We might walk out to the woods where hickory trees were dropping their nuts. We’d gather what we wanted in a gunny sack, so we could take them home to crack and shell.

I remember glorious sunny days, the leaves changing color, and the warmth of that in-between time just before the killing frost came. My father, who could be a man of temper, was relaxed on these days, and I, a teenager, was content to ride and listen to him talk about who used to live where on those gravel roads and to tell stories I’d heard before, but I didn’t mind hearing them again because I knew there was goodness in my father at a time when I was discovering the less flattering aspects of my own character.

On one Sunday, I was nursing my first hangover. On a campout the night before, my friends and I had drunk way too much beer, so much that I got sick and then passed out. When I woke the next morning, I was so ashamed of what I’d done, I went straight home and confessed everything. I could see how much I’d hurt my parents—my kind mother who wanted to believe in the best parts of me and my worldly father who knew a thing or two about a thing or two and was always on guard for evidence that I’d taken a wrong turn and was on my way to ruin.

He surprised me with his reaction to the news of my bad behavior. He didn’t shout, as I expected he might. He didn’t take off his belt and whip me, which he’d done before. His voice when he spoke was weary and hollow. “We didn’t raise you to be like that,” he said, and I knew I’d disappointed him, and, of course, that was my punishment, my knowing that.

The Sunday my parents had been expecting was now a different kind of Sunday, but when the afternoon came, and my father said we should go for a ride, I understood that part of what we learn as we age is how to keep putting one foot in front of the other, how to move on beyond disappointment and sadness.

It was another beautiful Sunday, and we were driving through the country, but everything felt different. We were trying to pretend it didn’t, but I knew it in my heart, and I could tell my parents felt it too. We all occupied a different space, one tainted by my actions, but we were trying our best to hold on to what we thought we knew—those gravel roads, those beautiful trees, the sunshine, the grace before the turn toward winter.

When I look back on that time, I feel a great affection for the people we were on that day. We were doing our best to hold onto what I’d come close to ruining—the feeling of being a family. No matter how sullied, we wanted to believe in the best parts of ourselves.

I tell this story to lead us to this writing prompt. It takes so little to upset what we want to believe. In my case, my bad judgment left my parents and me feeling ashamed. If you’re writing fiction, what does a character do to upset the regular come and go of things? How do people go on pretending nothing has changed when, at least for a time, everything has? If you’re writing creative nonfiction, perhaps you have a story of your own that will lead you to an investigation of a relationship that’s been affected by someone’s bad decision. Telling the story, whether factual or invented, always lets us think more deeply about the events and their significance.