The Speed of Life

I linger at my mother's house until I am the last one there, besides my mother. It is late, the day having transitioned to night hours before and it is sultry, without breeze, as I stand in the driveway looking back at the house.

There isn't much left inside. My brother moved most of the stuff this last weekend and I'm playing sweeper, coming in for some last big loads and my mom will be moved. The family home I've known since the second grade will be possessed by strangers. They are a nice family, my mother says, with two kids nine and eleven. I'm saddened by the thought that I will never cross the threshold again, looking for my mother, celebrating Christmas, or having summer barbecues on the back porch.

Time marches on, as it always does and I chalk it up to yet another change in the long list that has occurred in the last year. The monumental force with which my life is changing takes my breath away. I can't seem to find the lull in the action and I'm getting broadsided by events that I thought myself emotionally prepared for.

So I watch the house. The big front bay window looking in on the empty kitchen, the upstairs lights extinguished and the sound of silence coming from the basketball court in the side yard. I've lived so much of my life on that piece of ground. I lost my virginity in that house. I mourned family and friends in that house. I celebrated Christmas Eve for years on end with extended friends and family, a party that gained a reputation for the best of the season. And now its over. There will be no more Christmas in that house. I'm overcome with a flush of sadness as I trace the roof line, imagine the time I actually climbed the steep pitched roof to fetch a frisbee or a whiffle ball. It's unimaginable to me that someone else gets to lay claim to this physical representation of my family, my life.

And then I realize that the house is simply a shell. It isn't the thing itself. It isn't the family, it isn't childhood, it isn't even Christmas. It is a location, a place, and the power of it is encoded in my genes, in my memory, for me to savor for the rest of my life. I will tell its life in story.