408

I’m thinking about my parents. Adjusting to their final absence, the reality that our family home of 65 years stands empty and for sale, waiting for its next family to restore it to health and begin its new life. It’s being sold “as is”, which is to say, it needs to be stripped down to its bones and begun again. Love and familiarity kept my parents from needed improvements, comforts like air conditioning, a furnace that didn’t sound like the space shuttle taking off, a garage, perhaps, a kitchen with a stove that fit, and a dishwasher made in the 21^st century.

Anticipating this stage of our family’s life, I put together a book of photographs for my siblings that captured each room and space in the house we called 408: the front porch where our parents read four newspapers on summer mornings and interacted with neighbors as they passed with their dogs. The linen closet organized with thin white boxes clearly labeled with this or that grandmother’s linens, napkins, tablecloths, pillowcases, handkerchiefs. The stairs leading down to the living room where the six of us sat together desperate for our painfully slow parents to get up on Christmas morning. The picture of Rosie the Riveter taped to the side of the stove. Da’s workbench. It’s vise. It’s scramble of screwdrivers, drills, saws, nails, adhesives, wires, and files. My mother’s bookcase, her over-stocked pantry.

I wasn’t intending to write about 408 when I started writing this morning, but it makes sense that I would. I’ve been deeply tired the last few weeks. There are lots of good reasons: health concerns, war, Suki’s death, my friend John’s death, the state of things in our country. All of it’s enough to make me want to crawl under the covers and hide. But the underlying sadness is my parents. It’s the end of an era. The end of a home and I’m adjusting. Assimilating. Not weeping or desperate, just getting used to their absence. Making sense of the life that we led together and the life that I lead apart.

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Taking photographs helps. These are a few I took this morning.