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| the home of my youth... |
While I’ve been making sandwiches and cleaning tables at the Filling Station, bantering with my co-workers, my dad and step-mom are managing movers and moving trucks. They’re emptying the house my sister and I grew up in, and filling a new one that is just for them.
For months, I’ve been preparing for this. I mentally began sifting through my belongings while still in France. Then I came home, and donated several big bags and boxes of band t-shirts and miscellaneous home décor in within several days of touching down. Then came the drawn out, finer-tuned process of choosing and organizing memorabilia from childhood, and parting with what I can. There was the rental of a U-Haul and a storage unit and the mobilization of heroic volunteers to pack them. Lastly, only a few days ago, there was that inevitable final packing of the stuff that hasn’t gone anywhere else.
In this, there is for me a clear turning of the page, summed up by the rather dramatic “I DON’T HAVE A HOME ANYMORE!” that has echoed through these months. My parents’ home has been like an anchor to me, in all these years of singlehood and the jumping from home to home and roommate to roommate that involves. There, I could go back and put my roots down, be who I always have been while I remain who I am today. That home has remained stable while so many other factors in life have continued to swirl and change.
Now, however, is the time for that to take on a new shape as well. Dad and Joan need a place that’s theirs, not my mom and dad’s and my sister’s and mine. They need a home adapted to who they are now. Truth be told, so do I. I wouldn’t have chosen this, being the nostalgic sort, yet I can tell it’s just the thing for this season. Time to call the past done, to take responsibility for its remnants I intend to haul behind me through life. Although it’s right, it’s not easy. I grieve losing this place and the with-ness of the past that it embodies. I will also miss the ease of navigating its rooms, its drawers, its stairs that I know by heart. More than anything, I will miss the faint presence of my mother that I experience only there.
So, in this time when my childhood home fades from my life and I plan to go migrant this spring, I long for Home, without even really knowing what it means. A constant comfort to me is this passage from Hebrews that tells me I am not crazy, but am actually in the best of company.
“All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had the opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.” Hebrews 11:13-16
