It’s quiet in the house tonight. So quiet that I fish through a box in the tool shed out back and dig out an old AM radio and tune it to a static-filled news broadcast just to hear noise. The small house seems huge as I walk from one empty room to the next soaking in the loneliness.
Everything here reminds me of my grandfather.
Leaning against the door frame of the living room I can see him sitting in the recliner in the corner, glasses perched on his nose, working a word search from a pile of puzzle books on the table next to him. Without looking up he yells at me for running through the house, for kicking the gravel off the driveway, for building pillow forts in the dining room. Then, a much smaller version of me crawls under his book and into his lap and kisses him on the tip of his nose. And he tells me a story.
But I flip off the light and he is gone.
In the bathroom, I open the drawer for my toothbrush out of habit but only find it empty. I retrieve it from a packed up box in the hall – one of the few left in the house – and return it there when I’m finished. Only a couch and a couple of boxes are left in the house now.
My father used to tell me that a house was just a house – four walls and nothing more – but you could build a home anywhere. I credited this belief to his years as a real estate agent and contractor, building a selling hundreds of cookie cutter houses that ll looked exactly the same and meant nothing to him. Or it could have been his childhood spent following my grandfather as he was transferred to Air Force bases around the world. A house was just a house – in Guam, France, Saudi Arabia, or the U.S. – but with his family it was always a home.
But sitting in the empty house tonight I can’t help but be filled with memories of the times I spent here. Christmases and Easters and summers that were endless, yet never long enough. I was the only one who watched my grandmother pack the memories into boxes and load them onto the moving truck. My dad, my sister, my brothers, my aunts – no one seemed affected by the home we were letting go.
It’s not just a house. It’s 37 years of memories. For me it’s an entire lifetime of memories. And tonight part of me is sad. And I miss my grandfather all over again.
He will stay in this house when we lock it’s doors for the last time in the morning. He won’t move a couple of towns away with my grandmother and her new boyfriend. Our bulging stockings lined up in rows under the Christmas tree won’t move with us either. Nor will the Easter egg hunts in the front yard, or the swing between the trees out back, or the garden where I grew my cantaloupes.
We will leave those things here. With this house. With this home.
I’m afraid part of me will stay here too. Sitting in my grandfather’s recliner. Swinging with him out back. Opening Christmas gifts, dying eggs around the kitchen table, pruning rose bushes along the fence line.
Sitting here alone in the empty house tonight, listening to the old radio. This part of me will stay here with this house.
