Just A House

I always believed I would know when it was the right time.

I wonder maybe if I needed the past eight years not just to mourn or grieve, but to pack each of the memories into my heart's tote bag before I left.

I called the realtor this week. We had met last year, but the timing was off. I wasn't ready, or maybe I wasn't brave enough. There are so many reasons, so many excuses, and I don't know which, if any, are valid.

I remember standing together outside the white house on the corner on a sunny July afternoon. I held the little boy in my arms; the girl held tightly to her Father's hand. And, oh so foolishly, I said to my love, "We will stay a little while. Maybe two years."

And that was almost a half century ago.

We stayed while the little boy grew taller and the girl grew more beautiful, and they were soon joined by two rollicking younger brothers. We stayed while all four of them defied instructions and played in the wooden lots across from the little white house and then came home with poison ivy. We stayed while they learned to ride bikes and ice skate on the frozen pond in the woods. And it was far longer than the two years I had forecast.

We stayed throughout many Halloweens and walks through the park laughing and chanting the poet's famous words, "Whose Woods Are These," because we knew the woods were really ours.

We stayed for four graduations and oh, so many birthday parties. We waited up as the young drivers took the car out in the darkness of night. We stayed for proms and weddings and then finally, one funeral. And I still stayed and tried to pretend everything remained the same.

And in some ways it did. The house remained a source of comfort as it had during the long days when I visited various hospitals when my love and I both pretended he would recover. It kept me warm on the cold nights when I was unable to imagine the reality on my landscape of life. I still put the beautiful waxen pumpkins on the dining room table in the fall, and I still put up the lovely white Christmas tree that we had shared the final December of our marriage. The scent of lavender still filled the little white house.

I still made cookies and sent packages. I still put pots of flowers on the steps, but as the winter of my life approached, I could no longer pretend the little house on the corner was home to a family of six. I knew the cold chill of reality that I had been hiding from was touching my heart, and it was time to go. It was far beyond the two years I had predicted in the innocence of my youth.

I do not go easily into the darkness of an unknown night. I leave the little house on the corner reluctantly wishing I could turn the clock back again, and the halls would echo with laughter and sometimes loud voices, but I know that was a time that has passed forever, and I must go on and this time I must go alone.

While I am on the brink of a new adventure and the first major decision that I must make without him standing by my side, I will not allow myself to become intimidated. Because the little white house on the corner has given me the comfort and shelter I needed for the past eight years and allowed me the time to file each of the memories of an extraordinary lifetime carefully into my heart where they will never die.