The first thing I notice are the bushes.
They reach over the sidewalk, forming an arch of green.
Ducking beneath them, I think of my mother, reduced to ashes in a box.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Yet here, at this house, she is everywhere. Every corner hosts a memory.
Tomatoes, plump and red on the vine.
Tears over patent leather shoes lost under a bed.
A Christmas tree with presents piled high beneath it.
Marital discord played out on the front lawn, community theater for all the neighbors to watch.
I can’t remember one without the other.
After all, what is the good without the bad?
We do not choose our memories.
And although the outdoor drama was loud, it was merely a distraction to the great unraveling inside the walls.
Suitcases packed. Heavy footsteps out the door. With barely a backward glance, a distraught woman left with only three small children as her mirror. Children, it seems, are a most unreliable reflection.
Now, I watch my own ramble through the house where I once lived. Where I huddled around a radio hoping for a snow day and roller skated over the cracks in the sidewalk. Where I sat in bed and read novel after novel. Nancy Drew, Stephen King, eventually Sue Miller.
My oldest sits in the living room, my youngest beside him. Together, they thumb through old magazines.
I glance over at my dark-haired son. He is a little lost to me now. I find myself holding my breath around him, afraid he might fly off into the atmosphere, all teenage angst and resentment.
These maternal ghosts haunt me. All my mistakes stack up. For haven’t I played my own part in marital theater from time to time? Hasn’t my own jagged voice traveled out the window and down the driveway?
I remind myself.
I have built something new.
I have built something different.
Yet who are we without our own familial baggage weaving silvery threads through our landscape?
My son Jack traces the surfaces of each room lightly. Table, lamp, chair. Though his sight is perfectly intact, he absorbs the world through touch. It’s always been this way for him. Autism blurred the lines.
My own fingertips graze the bookshelves. I notice familiar titles, sent over the years through the mail. Ann Patchett. Nora Ephron. Barbara Kingsolver.
Our connection has always been other people’s stories. It was easier, perhaps, than examining our own.
Take what you want, my brother urges. We share the same eyes, the same smile.
I pick things up and put them back down again. I am confused by the things she chose to keep.
A rhinestone pin, a teacup with a chipped rim, a bright pink sewing kit full of half-used spools of thread.
Photo albums are spread out in the dining room—the special space reserved for Thanksgiving dinner and birthday cakes. Leafing through the vacation pictures with my daughter, I think of salty air. Towels on sand. The sound of waves crashing upon the shore fill my ears.
Earth’s cymbals.
I linger over an 8x 10 of myself. I am perhaps four and clearly delighted. Printed in black and white, the photo is large for 1978. I wonder who took it.
A realtor has been arranged.
The house will go to another family.
They will plant new flowers. They will make new music. They will find new cracks.
We do not choose our memories, it’s true.
We choose where to dwell.
We choose where to change.
Standing on the threshold, I decide to savor the color, the light.
Bright blue spools of thread, pink blossoms in summer, green and red beneath the tree.
Jumping in the waves beneath an endless summer sun.
Stepping outside, I hold them in the palm of my hand.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
The tomatoes on the vine are long gone.
The flowerbeds are overgrown.
Earth’s symbols.
I close the door.
Very touching.