From: jan <unicorn(a)sun-spot.com>
This week a young cousin contacted
me. A young mother with young children, she has known much sadness in her short life.
Within a few short years, she lost her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather.
Literally she lost three of the
four pivotal adults in her life. For some time now, the family home
place has set alone and empty. I had never asked my cousin why, or
what she really intended to do about it. I suspected I knew what
the delay might be. This week she contacted me, and I heard her
heart pouring out grief. The home place has been sold, and she
knows this is how it must be. She recognizes the reasons for it,
the practicality of it, even the necessity of it. But she
hurts. She spoke of being able to go there and walk through the
empty rooms, "hear" the long ago laughter and merriment of a
family gathering that will never be again. She spoke of feeling
near to her mother and grandparents when she is there. She spoke of
the finality of what is about to take place. And she asked me for
words
for words that would help her through this time. The best
words I could give her were those of a story I wrote once when I too,
recognized practicality and necessity
but felt the grief of
finality. I sent her the Rocking column below.
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*****
Saying Goodbye to a Home Place (from the "Sunday Afternoon
Rocking" series)
The day comes for most of us when we learn to say goodbye, not only to
persons of importance in our lives...but also to places. This summer that
chore came to rest on my own shoulders. Although I had tried to prepare
for it, it was not an easy one, and the experience was a voyage of
emotions and memories...
I pulled up in front of a home place that had not been dwelt in for a
number of years, and because of the circumstances, it stood as some
encapsulated version of a time that had been, a living ghost of time
standing still. My grown daughter beside me saw mostly simply an old
home, one she remembered but not well, she saw an empty front porch with
glider hanging limply from one leg. She saw curtained windows hiding
rooms she knew housed dusty furniture in the same positions they had been
left long ago. She dreaded sorting closets and wardrobes that held
clothes from eras mostly before her own birth, plowing through letters
and papers written long before she had joined the family. I saw something
far different...and perhaps I saw beneath the layers of dust and cobwebs
to another time in the same place...
They sat waiting for us on the front porch, chatting, laughing. My father
was there, my uncles. One reclined on the glider looking down toward us
at the street, throwing up his hand to wave. Another grinned broadly,
then went back to the story he was telling with animated gestures. My
father tapped his pipe on a porch post and told me to pull the car up a
bit closer to the curb. I knew they were reminiscing about the old times
"down home" and after I greeted my aunts I would join them a
while on the porch and listen to the tales I loved so dearly.
Blink back hot tears...no time for pain...a luxury for later, perhaps,
time only to be true to a family..to a
responsibility...later...later...
Laughter and merriment drifted through the open front door, fragrant
aromas of a dinner being prepared drifted out to greet us. A rocker
creaked in a front room and I peeked in to see Pa sitting with his Bible
spread out in his lap, peering through a magnifying glass to read the
words. He glanced up at me, brown eyes twinkling and asked if they had
the "spread on the table" yet.
For days we sorted, this box to Goodwill, this to a second hand store,
that to the dump. And softly over my shoulder always a ghost...
The pink dress billowed from the closet, and I remembered her twirling to
show me how it would look on a dance floor. She pulled out the pretty
"peek-a-boo" shoes that matched and told me that we would shop
for some pretty pink shoes for me too. She sat in front of me and handed
me nail polish so that I could "make her toenails pretty" and
watched smiling as I tried very hard to do it just right. She reached
down and curved her soft hand around my cheek, "You can be my little
girl too, you know." And so, in a way, I guess I was, since my aunt
never married and never had children of her own.
Because there was so much to do, and such a short time to do it
in....because the days were hot, and the house of another era...I could
not stop to linger, but sometimes....
The postcards were of western steers and wide open spaces. My
grandfather's scratchy handwriting was hard to decipher, but I was used
to it and long ago had learned to make out the words a stranger would not
take the time to do. He was in Texas visiting kindred, something he did
almost every year...he wrote of folks I had heard of all through my
childhood...and they were having birthdays, going to dinner on the
ground, visiting one another, living and breathing again as he told of
the fine time he was having. I thought I would write back to him, and
tell him one day I would join him there...
Surely no one would want these. Hat boxes...a grandfather's finery from
the 50's and 60's. Hat boxes...an aunt's finery from the same era... the
aromas....Old Spice. If I looked over my shoulder, Pa would be standing
there smiling. Tigress...my aunt was laughing as she came in the door
with a bundle of packages and surprises. I set aside one of Papa's hat
boxes to keep...an old bottle of Tigress cologne.
My choices of remembrances were odd ones. I warned my daughter that the
small box of what looked indeed like something aimed for the dump was
merely the menagerie of quirky little things that would go home with me,
and she looked askance at my strange choices but accepted.
And so it was at the end of a week, a time capsule had been emptied. Some
distributed to other family members, some left at a second hand store,
some taken to charity, some thrown away. The house that had greeted me
with long ago conversations and laughter, long ago rustling sounds of
busy folk in a happy household now echoed in hollow finality. Even my own
ears could no longer hear them, my own eyes no longer see any more.
Empty. Except for a few stray pieces of furniture here and there, all
signs that a few days before bore evidence of a once vibrant healthy
laughing family were gone. Whispers of the past softly floated to the
floor, quieting as they drifted, settling at last among the dust to await
the final cleansing, the final purging.
Goodbye. And yet...perhaps it is not. What greeted me when I pulled up to
finish the chore that no one left in the family was able to do lived not
in an empty house, but in a heart's memory. I can see my father and my
uncles as clearly in my mind sitting where I sit now as I could gazing up
at an empty front porch with a broken glider. I can hear my aunts'
laughter and see Pa's twinkling eyes as clearly as the day I walked
through a time capsule of things not touched in many years.
The things are not what makes them live. If that were so, the daughter
who stood beside me could have seen beyond those things as well. She
would have heard them, caught herself almost laughing with them,
answering them, calling out to them. She would have smelled the same
things I smelled and touched soft hands and seen flashes of the past. No,
it was not the things in a house left untouched that make all this so
real. The past of that house lives only in my memory, and I can revisit
where ever I am. The past is not about a home place that served its
purpose well, and now, for sake of practicality, must no longer exist for
us. It is about a heart. It will live as long as I remember...as long as
I share those memories with those who cannot. There need never really be
a goodbye.
just a thought,
jan
Copyright ©2000JanPhilpot
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Thanks, jan)
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