All.
An emptied house where furniture, lamps, carpets, plants used to be. Walls that have known shades ranging from pink to green to gray-blue. Others who saw a different shade of green, to another a different gray.
Memories fill every room. The scents of coffee cakes religiously prepared in a tube pan, the clinking of plates and silverware from many meals.
Knocks on the door of visitors, family and friends. Laughter in the yard from a long gone playground and swimming pool.
Cupboards emptied of clothes, shoes, books, jewelry, keepsake boxes and trinkets.
All loaded into trailers and vehicles and transported to other locations, to the next location. Time passes, nothing lasts forever.
It’s a hard thing to say goodbye to a space you’ve occupied for the better part of the past two decades and then more. The one where heights are measured on a door frame under a coat of paint, where chalk smiley faces are still stuck in the brickwork near the front door.
Remnants of what once was.
I’m not writing this to be a sad thing, although it is sad in its own way. How coming in and out of your childhood home for the last time can’t be a bit sad?
I walked through the rooms after almost everything was packed and loaded, feeling the space, absorbing the memories, and remembering all the ways each used to look. The sound of footsteps creaking on hardwood in a room filled with nothing but space.
Echoes.
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