Moving Day

Today is a very strange feeling day. Well, it has been a strange feeling month, but today my step-mom moved out of the family home. The step-family, Pop, my sister and I loaded almost everything from the house that my father built into cars, a trailer, 2 trucks, and a van. The cinder block ranch house now stands empty, except for a few small things. It is empty today, the only time since Mom, Dad, my brother, Jan, and family friends put together piles of supplies to make a home and the Zima family with five kids moved in.

We moved in during the month of September. I was three that September. Now, I sit on the floor of the hollow living room hearing, seeing and smelling memories. I remember how I loved it when we all slept on mattresses lined up in the living room because there were no floors or walls in the rest of the house, and Mom hung laundry on a line tied from the telephone poll in the front of the house through the window and fastened to a stud inside the kitchen. I smell fresh pine Christmas trees, nut roll baking, and that gooey stuff we used to clean the walls.

I hear music, singing, fights, laughter, the piano with thumb-tacks on the hammers and the Bing-bong of Grandpa Louie’s clock. Memories of Mom’s Kelly green carpet, Phyllis’s surprising her with a gift of Desert Rose dishes, Jan’s guitar, Tom’s whip, Mary and I singing and dancing to show tunes while we cleaned the house. Thoughts wander to Easter Monday’s water fights, snow on the roof needing to be shoveled off, strawberry picking, Topsy, cats, chickens, rabbits, geese, pigs, a sheep and a heifer, Oh and parakeets. All provided by my dad, Longie.

Memories are just traces, wisps of color and light effected by time and emotion; the woods, the lonelinesses, the dreams, the wonders, the fears. OK, no life is perfect, no dream complete. We do our best. We love each other. We hurt one another and learn to forgive. Praise God for inventing that! It’s the love that keeps us going.

Now, the echoes must fade. The house that Dad built will go to another family. And we? We keep on moving, lest we get caught by what was, or what we wish had been. We grab tightly to our dreams, praying for all we are worth that we can be just a bit like the people who built that house.