A tale in progress

Yesterday, I spent the better part of my day dealing with the detritus of age and it's affects at my fathers house. While he lay in bed bemoaning his need to be home, I was at his house stupefied at how quickly a place goes down hill.

My father took some nearly sixty years ago, a small cape built as military housing near a small airport, and turned it into a home. Without any formal training just Yankee wits, he converted those otherwise good bones into a tight little house for a family of six. A family mind you, he never really wanted to start but with some pressure from his bride they had, before moving to this fixer-upper.

My pride in his handiness is mixed with fading shame, for I never wanted to inherit this home. It resides in a neighborhood too close to business, mediocre schools, and memories while not awful they are memories I haven't completely reconciled with. Nonetheless, I always felt safe there,learned my independence while climbing trees, pilfering my fathers tools to build forts with, pretended to be a spy and to love the summers.

My father built several feet, of several feet high, flat stone walls mostly around our house, but in later years for a neighbor. He took his spare time and his lack of money, and his wealth of knowledge about the land to forage on weekends for long abandoned cellar holes. From those caved in and overgrown foundations he began to build his own.

Now, those walls still straight and solid, surround a house he's long failed to see clearly to maintain. He no longer can see his own food spills, the grimy stains from hands on walls and switches. The build up of coffee stains, and milk droplets and accidents. The garden my mother cultivated and passed on her love of flowers for, has long been overgrown. Bees have taken up residence underground and as we've recently discovered, mice have found a place to call their own behind the knotty pine walls he so lovingly protected his beloved with.

I spoke to my children thirteen and eight, and told them that I had no desire to be kept in a home when my time comes. That someday, I hoped to have a place in the woods I could go to, and of my own choosing, pass quietly away in. The thought of all that work and pride and sweat and towing the line so that someone else may profit just to end in a pitiful existence in a room away from home was too much to bear. They played it safe my parents. They bought the lie that hard work and obedience would pay off. (My father still worries that a bill not paid immediately upon receipt will be a mark against his name) and they earned themselves a bed in a home with underpaid staff.

As best we can tell, my mother has lost herself within herself and knows no better. Though I can tell you while I sit and look at her stare into her hands, that she knows too well what she has become. My father speaks repetitively of going home, and only needing a ride to get there. He does not understand that his body has now forsaken him. Or that if he were to simply break a rule that only exists in his head, he could call a cab and go home.

Life is short and lacks in guarantees. Grasp it whole, ignore the stings and live it well. Yes, it is hard to let go and imagine, but we have nothing left to lose.