Today I was talking with friends and was asked how things have been going. I mentioned that while everything has been pretty good, I still feel like a guest in my parent’s house. Thinking about it more, I realize that isn’t exactly how I mean it to sound, but I don’t have the right words to describe how I feel living in the place that was once their’s. They are no longer around to use it and it is now here for us kids, but I feel odd being in this space.
For those that do not know me (well), I grew up in this house. We moved into this house in 1977 when I was a wee lad and I lived here until I was 18. Though I had moved out, it was always like home. It felt like mom and dad. I guess that is the crux of the problem. I found myself at 44 years old, moving back into my childhood home to care for my ailing parents (though at just 5 monts before her passing my mother, in purple, in the picture above didn’t look like she needed to be cared for.)
The house represent 30 some odd years of my mother’s home-making. Everything you see in the picture above (minus the people of course) was placed there purposefully and with much thought by my mother. This house is her and as I move about the house I often half expect her to appear and tell me “That doesn’t go there” or “You are doing that wrong”.
An obvious solution would be to replace things in the house, but there really isn’t a practical reason to do so just because I sometimes feel weird about all her stuff being here. So I suppose I will just need to get over it and get used to the feeling that they are not here and that we are now the owners of the house. That her things are a nice memory of her and the work she put into the house rather than some twisted reminder that I am a guest in her home.
Here are two more picture of my parents wonderful home. They show the backyard and the garden my mother worked hard to create and the other picture is of the front porch that she was so proud to have.
