ontology | Our Long Goodbyes

I'm back, and the house looks all out of place, as it generally does when I leave it. The colours are all wrong, and I have to get used to it all over again. Epically long car-drive last night, or at least it felt like it, since I didn't manage to drift off until the very last leg of it, and then had to help bring things into the house, and then could not help but poke at pictures and whatnot, which resulted in me not getting to bed until two thirty.

So, yes, the trip. So much happened in two-and-a-half days; I feel as if I've been gone nearly a week. Not only were we there to attend my great-uncle's memorial service, but we were helping my grandparents sort through reams of stuff they needed to get rid of as they're moving to a two-room flat in a retirement community soon. They've lived in their house for forty years. My dad grew up in that house. I have so many childhood memories of that house: showing up in the wee hours of the morning at Christmastime; watching movies through the bars on the stairs because I preferred the stairs to the couch, and Grammy would bring me and my cousin Andrea freshly popped popcorn in wooden snack bowls; sleeping in the cold, old-fashioned bedroom that used to belong to one of my aunts; watching Saturday morning cartoons in my grandparents' bedroom with Andrea; clambering through the trees in the backyard at the age of ten; nicking candy from the bowl that was always set out on the buffet table; sitting on benches around the kitchen table eating breakfast in the morning with my cousins; making Halloween cookies with weird icing...all these odd little memories keep springing up as I type. I'm going to miss that house.

It hasn't really sunk in, though, that I may never see the place again. Yes, major pieces of furniture are dismantled. All the bookshelves are gone. There are boxes everywhere. But it's still there. They're still there. I'm emotionally disconnected. We'll go to visit them next year in some sterile little flat with no character and no memories, and it's going to sink in, and I'm probably going to have to go into the bathroom and cry.

Things change. Things have been changing a lot over the past couple of years, and I'm not sure if I'm ready for it. I don't suppose we really are ready for change when it comes. I suppose we just learn to ride with it, and some of us do better than others. Things that have been staples of my early life are going away. A guy I remember as an amusing teenager years and feet away from my six-year-old self grew up, had a family, and lost his life in a wartorn desert halfway around the world. I'm not in New England anymore. I'm going away to college in two or three years. A year ago I chose a completely different career than what I'd thought I was going to do for the rest of my life. And my grandparents just sold the house I've known forever.

I don't know where this is going. I've felt sort of moody and depressed today--not because of the house thing, so far as I know, but more because I had things to do and people to talk to all day for the past several days, and now I'm back in my routine of nothingness. I had a really amazing time in Media and New Jersey, though; I'm going to have to write about it more: mad midnight antics, looking through ancient photos, city-love, the Event Itself, my "long-lost" relatives, "that's not your grandfather!", Geico commercials, sandwiches with too much meat, the bizarre things one finds at Trader Joe's, the old graveyard, neighbours, Lingo, the book game. Laughing until I choked. Things.

I am currently in possession of two things: my grandmother's wedding dress, hand-sewn by my great-grandmother way back in the fifties (she was married in fifty-four), and my grandfather's combat boots. Which are real combat boots. From the Korean War. (He was a medic.) So, yeah, now I can tell punk/goth kids that I'm more hardcore than them because they have fake combat boots and I have real ones. But seriously, these are really gorgeous boots. I'd like them to be a little higher, and a little smaller, but they fit me fantastically, and they're in excellent shape for being fifty years old. Grammy was just going to throw them out, but I tried them on and they're wonderful. They grip my ankles nicely, and although there's maybe an inch of extra room in the toe, they don't feel wobbly. I wore them to the memorial service with my ankle-length dark brown skirt and my black shirt. (Hey, it was either combat boots or pseudo-Converses. I'm only beginning on my shoe collection.)

Er. Should a) work on The Wise and the Lovely and force the ending to stop reeking dramatically or b) GO TO BED. Or something.