<Note: Because I will be off line a good deal of the weekend, Sunday Afternoon Rocking is being sent early.> Saying Goodbye to a Home Place (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" series) Afternoon All, The day comes for most of us when we learn to say goodbye, not only to persons of importance in our lives...but also to places. This summer that chore came to rest on my own shoulders. Although I had tried to prepare for it, it was not an easy one, and the experience was a voyage of emotions and memories... I pulled up in front of a home place that had not been dwelt in for a number of years, and because of the circumstances, it stood as some encapsulated version of a time that had been, a living ghost of time standing still. My grown daughter beside me saw mostly simply an old home, one she remembered but not well, she saw an empty front porch with glider hanging limply from one leg. She saw curtained windows hiding rooms she knew housed dusty furniture in the same positions they had been left long ago. She dreaded sorting closets and wardrobes that held clothes from eras mostly before her own birth, plowing through letters and papers written long before she had joined the family. I saw something far different...and perhaps I saw beneath the layers of dust and cobwebs to another time in the same place... They sat waiting for us on the front porch, chatting, laughing. My father was there, my uncles. One reclined on the glider looking down toward us at the street, throwing up his hand to wave. Another grinned broadly, then went back to the story he was telling with animated gestures. My father tapped his pipe on a porch post and told me to pull the car up a bit closer to the curb. I knew they were reminiscing about the old times "down home" and after I greeted my aunts I would join them a while on the porch and listen to the tales I loved so dearly. Blink back hot tears...no time for pain...a luxury for later, perhaps, time only to be true to a family..to a responsibility...later...later... Laughter and merriment drifted through the open front door, fragrant aromas of a dinner being prepared drifted out to greet us. A rocker creaked in a front room and I peeked in to see Pa sitting with his Bible spread out in his lap, peering through a magnifying glass to read the words. He glanced up at me, brown eyes twinkling and asked if they had the "spread on the table" yet. For days we sorted, this box to Goodwill, this to a second hand store, that to the dump. And softly over my shoulder always a ghost... The pink dress billowed from the closet, and I remembered her twirling to show me how it would look on a dance floor. She pulled out the pretty "peek-a-boo" shoes that matched and told me that we would shop for some pretty pink shoes for me too. She sat in front of me and handed me nail polish so that I could "make her toenails pretty" and watched smiling as I tried very hard to do it just right. She reached down and curved her soft hand around my cheek, "You can be my little girl too, you know." And so, in a way, I guess I was, since my aunt never married and never had children of her own. Because there was so much to do, and such a short time to do it in....because the days were hot, and the house of another era...I could not stop to linger, but sometimes.... The postcards were of western steers and wide open spaces. My grandfather's scratchy handwriting was hard to decipher, but I was used to it and long ago had learned to make out the words a stranger would not take the time to do. He was in Texas visiting kindred, something he did almost every year...he wrote of folks I had heard of all through my childhood...and they were having birthdays, going to dinner on the ground, visiting one another, living and breathing again as he told of the fine time he was having. I thought I would write back to him, and tell him one day I would join him there... Surely no one would want these. Hat boxes...a grandfather's finery from the 50's and 60's. Hat boxes...an aunt's finery from the same era... the aromas....Old Spice. If I looked over my shoulder, Pa would be standing there smiling. Tigress...my aunt was laughing as she came in the door with a bundle of packages and surprises. I set aside one of Papa's hat boxes to keep...an old bottle of Tigress cologne. My choices of remembrances were odd ones. I warned my daughter that the small box of what looked indeed like something aimed for the dump was merely the menagerie of quirky little things that would go home with me, and she looked askance at my strange choices but accepted. And so it was at the end of a week, a time capsule had been emptied. Some distributed to other family members, some left at a second hand store, some taken to charity, some thrown away. The house that had greeted me with long ago conversations and laughter, long ago rustling sounds of busy folk in a happy household now echoed in hollow finality. Even my own ears could no longer hear them, my own eyes no longer see any more. Empty. Except for a few stray pieces of furniture here and there, all signs that a few days before bore evidence of a once vibrant healthy laughing family were gone. Whispers of the past softly floated to the floor, quieting as they drifted, settling at last among the dust to await the final cleansing, the final purging. Goodbye. And yet...perhaps it is not. What greeted me when I pulled up to finish the chore that no one left in the family was able to do lived not in an empty house, but in a heart's memory. I can see my father and my uncles as clearly in my mind sitting where I sit now as I could gazing up at an empty front porch with a broken glider. I can hear my aunts' laughter and see Pa's twinkling eyes as clearly as the day I walked through a time capsule of things not touched in many years. The things are not what makes them live. If that were so, the daughter who stood beside me could have seen beyond those things as well. She would have heard them, caught herself almost laughing with them, answering them, calling out to them. She would have smelled the same things I smelled and touched soft hands and seen flashes of the past. No, it was not the things in a house left untouched that make all this so real. The past of that house lives only in my memory, and I can revisit where ever I am. The past is not about a home place that served its purpose well, and now, for sake of practicality, must no longer exist for us. It is about a heart. It will live as long as I remember...as long as I share those memories with those who cannot. There need never really be a goodbye. just a thought, jan Copyright ©2000JanPhilpot .________________________________________________ (Note: Afternoon Rocking messages are meant to be passed on, meant to be shared...simply share as written without alterations...and in entirety. Thanks, jan) Sunday Afternoon Rocking columns are distributed weekly on the list Sunday Rocking. This is not a "reply to" list, and normally only one message per week will come across it, that being the column. To subscribe send email to [email protected] _________________________________________________