Epitaph for a Home

I dropped Andrew off at drivers ed today, and then headed to the parsonage. The house had been emptied of all our belongings (except the refrigerator), but there was still quite a bit in the garage. During Andrew's class, I loaded the van with most of that stuff. When Gary got off work, he drove down, and one of the guys from church helped us load the big things into his trailer. So now everything's out, and we're done there.

It feels odd. On the one hand, it's good. That parsonage is mildew infested, centipede infested, and my bedroom window-sill is composed of wood crumbs and Asian beetle corpses glued together with too much paint. The parsonage is mildew infested [you think that's a mistake that I type that adjective twice? NO] and has rotten ventilation in the attic and a stupidly designed kitchen. It has not been infested with mice since we lived there because we kept cats (but it was plagued with mice for a couple of decades). The basement floods. Sizable wild mammals lived in the crawlspace at times. It was poorly insulated so that my bedroom was horribly cold all winter. The foundation is cracking. And by the way, it's mildew infested. Not a good house.

But still...
it's home.

This afternoon, after I'd loaded the van, waiting for the guys to show up, I looked around. I vacuumed that carpet thousands of times; I shampooed it dozens of times. Thousands of diapers flapped in the breeze on that clotheslines. I know the good hiding places on the lawn for Easter eggs. I painted those walls. My children picked those dandelions and brought me beeeeautfiul bouquets. Over there was my strawberry patch, and over here was Beau's pen and stable. The lilacs are late this year; I know because this is WPA weekend, and every year I prepped for my lectures with the perfume of lilacs. How many times did I hang streamers in this dining room to celebrate birthdays? The cutting board in this kitchen is where my children begged to help eat the apple peelings when applesauce was being made. This is where we got to know Matt and Nathan. That south patch of the lawn was where my children learned to make contact between a plastic bat and a whiffle ball, and which direction to head when you hit the ball. Those hostas that I transplanted and were so puny are now growing lush and full. That "weed" that showed up in my garden is now an aspen over 25' high. When I sit in the empty house and need to know the time, I look at the empty place on the wall where the clock lived for 17 years. When I sit in the empty house, killing time with my editing, and Fabrizius says something awesome, my eyes drift to the place on the wall where the crucifix is no longer hanging.

It may be a wretched building,
it may be a horrible house,
but it was my home.