Every Little Thing I Did Not Keep

There are trees blossoming in the woods of the mountains in Pennsylvania right now, white flowers quietly highlighting the nubile green of the hills. I notice this on my drive home. 15 hours in the pounding rain seems a fitting end to a difficult project. Why make it easy now? But Mom and Dad’s house is finished. I am exhausted.

Thurman defines memory as, “one of God's great gifts to the human spirit without which neither life nor experience could have any meaning.” I see that. I waded through so many memories it sometimes was hard to breathe.

Memory seems to become the fiber of our vision, ingrained, like the warp and weft of fabric, so tightly bound it looks seamless but in reality has so much texture. It becomes the very lens of our eye. It is hard to tell sometimes how deeply memory influences our todays. That is until you are sitting in boxes and boxes of them. Then you have to decide whose memories to keep. Do I keep the ones of mine or the ones of theirs?  What carries on what  stops here and is lost. I think that is the hardest part. Every thing you don’t keep has lived its life and the story is written. You now have to say good bye…again. There are lists of things I loved and did not keep, many I found new houses for but many I did not. In the end I filled 3 thirty yard dumpsters with so much stuff. It challenges how I move memories forward.

I carry a torch for the people I have loved. I believe firmly in living into my ancestral integrity. I want my grandparents to be proud and not sitting on some celestial sofa shaking their heads that nothing they contributed in their time here moved forward with dignity. Maybe that is it. Closing a house is the final moment we let our parents go - with dignity. That is a hard place for a dumpster.  But good memories are love in the present, like childbirth I tend to let the bad ones ride on. The good become our soul.

As I finally stood in the empty house I noticed the loud tick of a clock. Recognizing the distinct tick I walked down the bedroom hall to the bath where the clock still hung, missed by the clean out crew. I remembered Dad hung it there so we would not get so caught up getting ready we were late for church. I closed my eyes and listened as the memories came running down that hall into my heart; The first time I saw the house, getting ready for Prom, primping for church to go flirt, grabbing a warm blanket on a cold night, Birthday cakes at the kitchen table- a literal lifetime of cakes, grand babies being held by great grandparents for the first time, secret parties we hoped the neighbors did not out us for, peanut butter cookie baking, the smell and sounds of thanksgiving stuffing being made the night before, sneaking in late and hopping the creaks in the kitchen floor, cards decorating the table commemorating every holiday until the next one, Mom running down the hall to yell at me and bashing her nose on the corner of the wall….and breaking it. (Yes I felt bad but to be honest I did nothing wrong) The wear pattern of a life in the orange shag carpet. Ultimately dad was carried out down the hall and past the clock. Mom packed her doll suitcase and walked out the door as well.

Quietly I reached up and took the clock down and stopped the hands. Silence. Our families time here is done. I turned and walked out of the house leaving the clock on the bathroom counter behind me. Like the trees quietly blossoming in the woods this house is now ready for new life.