Moving and memories
It’s taken a dozen people and almost as many full working days, but my mother-in-law has moved out of her house, the place she called home for the last 40-plus years.
Forty plus years of daily debris jammed in drawers, closets and cupboard shelves. Forty plus years of dings embedded on a yellowed linoleum kitchen floor. Forty plus years of family and friends, strangers and acquaintances, all striding across the concrete pad that led to that dark green front door.
A marriage was lived there. Two sons were raised. Daughters-in-law and grandchildren were welcomed. Friends gathered for dinners, lunches, parties. Losses lamented and victories celebrated.
Thousands of laughs were shared and thousands of tears were shed, both happy and sad.
She knew she needed to move, but she really didn’t want to go. This was the home she shared with her husband, raised her family, hosted all those friends. But the house, which might have felt stretched to the seams in its past with all the life being lived inside it, was now looming too large.
Her short-term memory is falling short these days. Hundreds of tiny notes were scattered all around the house to serve as reminders, but she might not have been able to remember what the notes meant.
April 19th, read one, is moving day. Moving out on April 19, read another.
“My sons are coming on April 19 to make me leave my home” — that was the last one I could bear to read.
The years of her trying — but being unable even with help — to maintain four bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths and a two-car garage on her own took it’s toll on her and the house.
In the end the house had acquired the scent of not only typical neglect — the dust hidden in the ancient shag carpet and lodged behind the antique furniture that hadn’t been moved in who-knows-when. It also had the aroma of melancholy, of something that had once been vivid now faded, once fresh but now stale.
It’s time let another family love it, we told her as we drove her and a fraction of her belongings to her new one-bedroom apartment. Time to thank it for its service and let this house find its new purpose.
She knew that, she said. Of course, she knew.
But that house is where so many of her memories were created and curated. That house is where those long-ago-and-far-away scenes of almost five full decades played out — her adults sons as boys, her adult grandchildren as babies. Those memories are still vivid for her.
Those pesky daily transactions that now mentally slip away from her almost as fast as they happen? Not so much. Hundreds of little notes are, unfortunately, of little help.
Most poignantly, that house is where she lived with the husband she loved for more than half a century and who, sadly, is now more than five years gone.
You take him with you, we assured her. He goes where you go. That’s how he continues on, in your memories. We take the ones we love wherever any of us go, wherever we happen to call home.
After all the furniture is dispersed, the closets cleared and the shelves emptied, the memories of the life we lived in a house are all that is really left.
And that is all we really have to take with us when, eventually, we all move on.
