REALITY?: An end to a space in time

Under the tree every Christmas, Madame Alexander dolls with mother-made taffeta dresses, the dolls bought nude because they were affordable and Mother’s mother had sewn ballgowns in Poland. A doll, books and games my sister and I would ask from Santa, the same drunken old man at Howard & Barber every year–I have pictures of us on his knee. The first year we moved up the hill, from my grandparents’ house down below, the first winter, walking up the road in snow a couple feet high, I got walking pneumonia and stayed out of school for four months.  The year my dad hosed the front yard into a skating pond.  A hundred trees planted, another fifty, and several more.  A family room and a two-car garage added on after the first oldest married and left.  Working with my dad on the oak flooring–he had me marking out the holes for the walnut pegs. He taught me to paint, how to trim around woodwork, how to wire a light fixture, how to fix a faucet. Barbeques as the family grew larger. And oh, walking uphill to see her sister, my aunt, the time my mom near set the house on fire because we stayed too long and forgot dinner.  A wife and three daughters nervous watching my dad putting the roof on himself, a colonial–he had no fear of height.  So one Christmas we had him climb the maple tree to put up a star. The fires we’d start down in the lot, my dad and me, trying to burn up the brush, feed the lawn; the fire department only had to come help us twice when the wind caught the field up at Jacek’s.  So much more, so much more than a house.  My childhood, my parents, my family all gone for a paper I reluctantly sign.  Even as I know things end into beginnings, there’s an emptiness in my whole being I can’t deny.