on an early Sunday morning
as I take my leave…
some sirens in the distance
the air is cool, the sun
strangely weak for summer
filters down through trees
signaling sadness - nearby
church bells ring
sometimes I think
that I don’t remember much
about growing up in Seattle
but in my heart I remember
everything
Oh, freedom, Oh, freedom
Oh freedom over me
And before I'd be a slave
I'd be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free
~ author unknown
These days I have…
The Freedom to stay or go
The Freedom to say yes or no
The Freedom to admit when I am
wrong, or don’t know something
the Freedom to say I’m sorry
or I’m angry without spinning
off into emotions that
are out of control
the Freedom to have feelings
and boundaries, to have good
days and bad - the Freedom to
finally fully mourn the long-ago
death of my Dad
The Freedom to acknowledge
That I, and even my Freedom, are
A work in progress
Happy Summer Solstice!
usually in child’s pose...
because it’s June
so soon, and my mind’s
still stuck in March
when we four siblings
last time lived together
in our family home and
took it all apart
now, just scratch the surface
and there’s tears
because it sold (what a relief!) and
I can’t stop thinking about the
quick blink of these past 25 years
the house precariously maintained
by Mom, and lucky for us it was enough!
but nothing compared to how Dad loved it
I took for granted his constant house projects
growing up: Mariner’s game on the radio
interspersed with sound of the circular saw
my childhood disinterest in all his hard work
replaced now by adult understanding and awe
and what would he think of what it became?
these shining hardwood floors, the
pristinely-pressure washed and
painted decks, the new French doors?
sorrow rising up in me when
I think of golden moments
only realized after they are gone
and pride picturing Dad smiling
up in heaven, as we cash in his
house to take care of Mom 😍
Our house
is a very very very fine house
with 2 cats in the yard
life used to be so hard
now everything is easy cuz of you
~ Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Our Dad loved our house. Besides his family and his accounting business, it was probably the major focus of his life. Who can forget how he dug out the basement, one bucket of dirt at a time, before refinishing it, paying the neighborhood kids 5 cents a bucket? (5 cents!)
Recently my siblings and I sort of out-loud wondered “what did he do with all that dirt?” and my childhood memory doesn’t include that detail but most likely he used it to grade the front yard where he built a retaining wall. He also built a wrap around deck on which we had more cookouts than can be counted. He wanted to get a wood-burning stove for the rec room basement and talked about finishing the attic also.
And who knows, he may have actually gotten to these projects if not for his untimely death back in 1996.
Our Mom maintained the house pretty well in the intervening 25 years (with a lot of help from her family and friends). Even so, we found there was quite a bit of work to do fixing the few critical items we found with inspection completed last spring, and to overall make it look “clean and fresh” - hoping that some lucky buyer is going to pay top dollar for it, since it’s really our Mom’s only remaining asset. All of that plus just getting all the STUFF out of there, before the fixing up even started, has been an intense experience.
This last visit to Seattle, unlike the one in March, my sister and I couldn’t stay at the house like we normally do when we go “home” because of course it’s emptied of all furniture, and my two brothers have been moved out for a few weeks now. But we made multiple trips from our nearby Airbnb and each time the house had transformed a little bit more, and now I am seeing the final changes from afar.
Our house transforming - until it’s almost unrecognizable as ours.
And maybe it’s embarrassing
Because it’s not always good
But I’ve not always done the age
-appropriate things that I should
so why start now?
Refused children, developed a decent
Career despite myself, bottomed out but
Got clean and healthy, re-discovered endorphins
stayed married somehow
Maybe that’s all of my life in a nutshell
But now I read these silly
notes from middle school,
love letters from college
boyfriends and air-mail envelopes
- par avion - from women friends
contain adventures we had, musings,
stories, aspirations for our lives ahead -
lives we now live and I wonder:
do any of us have
what we envisioned?
Some days are dreary -
Doing dishes, answering voice mail,
Filing taxes and tending endless
Needs of children - others are golden -
That trip to Portugal, births and sunsets,
family and college reunions,
A really good meal
All - I would speculate - are fortunately
pretty well grounded, but these missives
From the past remind me that
Once upon a time
We flew
Sibling fights and realizations
Such as “our mom was a slight hoarder”
It’s so painful to still be a child
In this house and inexorably
Getting older
Efficient trips to Goodwill
In the wet weather
Slow walks to mom’s ALF
In the softening sun
Masked backyard gathering
With childhood friends
Screaming tears of laughter
At adolescent anguish we documented
Proves that even adult women with
invalid parents in a Pandemic can still be
“girls just wanna have fun”
Back at 1710 the work is
Slowly, amazingly
Getting done
One more drawer to empty
Of its contents...wait, just one more...
How did we get here?
Are we doing the right thing?
Is there any way out of this
Other than such a scary
final door?
As I walk and drive my childhood
City, spring arrives with
daffodils & cherry tree blossoms
I should return “home” more frequently
So I can break my heart more often
If that is what hearts are for
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.
*************************************************
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
*************************************************
“A Family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.” ~ Pat Conroy
The wonder is hooray, we made it!
To the end of this weird rotten year.
For those of us who made it.
For those of us not dead or dying or
Imploding with existential dread, loneliness and fear.
The wonder is we impeached
the president, but did not convict.
And most people, sadly,
don’t even know the difference.
I read a whole book about the first time - Andrew Johnson
and the failure of Reconstruction - to make sure I did.
But the wonder is how no one talks about it:
4 million black men and women, freed
But not free at all - not even today.
And what it has to do with MAGA and how
Those who are not innocent, have never been made to pay.
How none of us are innocent, but all complicit.
All persons never having been equal: the American Way.
Trump as the direct inheritor of Johnson’s
Acceptable white supremacy;
Johnson as Lincoln’s irretrievable mistake.
Horrific legacy we must face:
what reparation can and will we now make?
But there are so very many challenges: this world on fire
And yet some still debate whether or not
there is such a thing as “man-made” climate change.
The wonder is how long we can deny, and bury
Our heads in the sand, and pretend
That it’s just this year, somehow, and
It will be better in 2021, magically.
The wonder is clear mornings now on my balcony
where I used to nightly obliterate and escape.
Today the sun comes up, sweet bird song
And coffee help my soul sit down, resting
And contemplating it all for one minute...
The wonder is there seems to be an infinite
amount of mornings just like this - until there isn’t.
Although this year? I don’t think anyone will try to “keep the year alive” - most of us want it to die! And get to 2021 so that things may be better....
