Home is so Sad ~ Phillip Larkin
https://poets.org/poem/home-so-sad
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
of anyone to please, it withers so,
having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
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The last ornament was the Christ baby in a walnut shell. Pinning it to the tree was a task for a child, for someone credulous and hopeful, and Denise could now see very clearly that she’d made a program of steeling herself against the emotions of this house, against the saturation of childhood memory and significance. She could not be the child to perform this task. Pg.514 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. The tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by Enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body - softer, more mortal and organic - than like a building.
Pg.541 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
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“A Family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.” ~ Pat Conroy
