That house held my grief
and it held
my joy.
A hundred, thousand times
I was a second grader in that house.
Laying in the sun with the dogs.
Mom helped me find the best
and biggest seed for my class project:
an Avacado pit.
The kitchen was filled with sun
Mom laughed one night
pointing to all the cupboards
I'd leave open. Year later, she apologized.
"You are just different than me. I celebrate that."
There was the dining room with the china
Jess and I would threaten to fight over.
Each year when mom served lasagna for Thanksgiving
And rolls that were burnt until about 1999
When there was almost always
someone extra at the table.
The family room with the old grey couch cushions
that you could push back, and slither your way
into the small cavern left by the fold-out mattress.
The white carpet the dogs stained with food coloring
and the green one that I used to lay on and talk
while the Buckeye game played overhead,
Surprised to feel so
able
to rest
We all sat around tables:
the heavy wood one
Jess cried about in elementary school,
The glass topped one
we sat around years later, sipping beer,
eating fondue and baby carrots
And that celebrated perennial cheese dip
My brother's red-haired girlfriend
became his wife. My sister told stories.
We laughed. We lived
the way you do
when you are sitting in a kitchen
that has always been there.
I had two rooms. One, the setting for slumber parties:
white furniture and the carpet I first learned to pray on,
pressing my face into the roughness. Then, the basement. Cool and dark,
during transition seasons after college, between jobs
It's the place I first remember
knowing how to be me there
in that house,
standing within the Embrace.
And there are bad memories and sad ones.
Many many. The yelling years. The accusing.
Fear-filled prayers and over-washed hands and sideways
love that pulled and used and was never satisfied.
(We would lose part
of ourselves to deny these things.
I don't want to deny them.)
I want, instead, to tell you
about the time, last year
I was able to come home
fresh from a breakup, and tired
and go for a walk
with my mother and sister
along a new path mom showed us
And how we took pictures there, my sister and I
Silhouetted against grey clouds
and I felt, somehow, healed
or healing at least,
Because I was home.
What I want to say is, that when my parents signed over
that house last week,
I lost a lot. We all did.
The pine trees besides the driveway. The deck at night.
The cool air and the rain and ruts in snow and the warm deck and the stars.
That part of the yard we all stood in on our last night
just because we never really stand there, the bonfire in the distance.
The thousand thousand seasons and loves and friends and ideas
and hopes and forgivenesses and hurts and healings. God
you were with us. You were with us.
Mornings when I emerged to Dale on the deck
a crossword and his coffee,
My past in my present and my heart newer
softer. Willing. Forgiven.
God thank you.
So we had also gained
I think we should plant a flag. Erect some stones.
Kill the fattened calf. Say thank you.
Thank you
Thank you.
For our lives. For healing. For forgiveness
for hope.
It's interesting that
I, in my third decade,
felt like I have actually lost
a place I called
"home"
And that
is something.
