REALITY?: Movin On

Today I went home, most likely for the very last time.  We moved in when I was ten years old, in a cold snowy January that had us walking down the hill to the mailbox in unplowed waist-high snow.  I got walking pneumonia that first winter, and stayed out of school until my First Communion in May.  When I was twenty-two I had to fight for independence, took an apartment thirty miles away with a co-worker, and the summer I moved out, I was back home to stay with them a month, recuperating from an ovarian cyst operation.  The next time I slept there was when my Dad was ill with flu, and he couldn’t watch my mother, in the later stages of Alzheimer’s.  I finally got her to leave him in peace so he could get some needed rest, but many times I woke to find her standing over me.  I thought it strange that she wasn’t frightened to find me there, asleep in the dark room by myself.  She wouldn’t stay in her own room for longer than a half an hour.  I finally took her downstairs to the kitchen and made some tea.  With a heavy splash of raspberry brandy.  She slept through to the morning.  I stayed over once more, in the days following my mother’s death, so he wouldn’t be alone.

We brought back my mother’s sewing machine.  That’s all I needed, wanted, for the memories of the gowns and dresses, skirts and costumes she produced for each of us.  And I have my dad’s binoculars, and scythe.  And now they, the house, my childhood is all gone and yet forever part of me.