Homesick

Last week, when I was down changing the locks on the house and boarding up the broken window, I walked through the house and thought about the first weeks, when we were making it our home and how it had this smell of wood and old cedar and then after a while it smelled like us. Garlic, onions, beans cooking, cornbread, and cookies and of course, my son’s socks, his testosterone leaking from every pore, especially when my daughter’s friends danced around the house, the smell of my daughter’s experimentation with so many hair styles and perfumes and make up and finally her candles she burned to hide the smell of drugs. It’s all there, no secrets. IN the closet behind a little shelf, my daughter’s love notes, I found them. I tied them up with a ribbon and slipped them into a box of her things. I wanted to read them, but they had the familiar curls and inexperience of a little girl and I knew they were for her only. I hope she keeps them and doesn’t throw them away.

The door facing where I scratched in my children’s growth gave me a flashback of his 12 year old self standing there, so proud to be getting close to 6 feet tall and then when he shot up to 6’4” and me not able to measure him because I was too short and how he smiled when his sister stood on a stool to get the right mark and he held his breath while we did the math to convert the inches into feet. That seemed so tall.

Then I found the pictures of my son and our neighbor, a childless couple and he, my son, was going to the prom and they called for him to come over and get his picture taken with them, and they gave him ten bucks to buy his date a coke. I was in a wheel chair by that time and looked out of the door as he drove off and thought that I was not going to get to see him and the girl together but in thirty minutes he pulled back up with his friends and their dates and they all took turns getting their picture made with me, the good son’s mom.

I know that I will always have those memories, but when I am in there and everyone is outside looking around or taking more boxes of our things out, I just feel this incredible loss. It’s sad that a home is so hard to find and so hard to leave. I have had many houses in my adult life, but I have not a home since my mom died until this one and leaving it is so hard. Maybe, I won’t sell it, maybe I’ll keep it and someday I’ll move back in it and everything will be okay. I’m not sure.