Currents

Yesterday, I thought about the passage of time, the changing of the guard, the yardstick of life. I was driving through neighborhoods and down streets in my old hometown. It's funny how I used to know who lived in almost every house. I remember how to find their kitchens and the cabinet whereas to find a glass for a drink of water. As I traveled by houses, I wondered if the kitchens were the same, or was everything erased and made brand new? Some houses had been painted different colors, and a few were now in ill repair. But for me, ghosts still lingered in the yards, at the front doors, at the mailboxes as they meandered down their driveways sifting through mail, stopping to admire a bush, waving at a car as it cruised by, although now, in reality, everything is relatively empty. It is all buried in my memory of collected thoughts.

I think about how very important things were on a different day, at a different time. The faces I knew were rushing to the store for something to fix for dinner along with all the other undeniably critical duties of people's lives at that long ago time. Now, no one even thinks about them, those people before. They have been removed for the end of life, and placed in a nursing home, or they have already died, and the very busy lives that they lived seem almost insignificant. All of the joy and all of the sorrow erased like a blackboard at the end of a school day. Rarely is there a fingerprint left to remind us that someone once lived before in the red brick house where the trees have now grown taller than the rooftop. It is someone else's house, someone I have never met, and the front door is now painted a colonial green, and there is not a single chair on the big front porch nor an empty spot where the white painted swing once hung that we used to fight over. I remember long summer nights, fireflies twinkling in the moist summer air, and feeling a permanence to everything, and yet in a blink, in this now, everything has changed. The streets are mostly quiet, and lives have been exchanged like the clearing out of the closet. And then tell me, what really remains?

The condominium community where my mom once lived is always in the motion of moving in and moving out. Penske trucks pull in and unpack or pack up and pull out, old faces are gone, and new faces appear. My mom lived there for almost thirty years after my dad died. She told me that once he was gone, she became invisible. Her days spent in a routine of nothingness. I would tell her to move, to begin again, but she had every reason as to why moving was a bad idea, and yet, those last thirty years were long and lonely. No one probably remembers my mom all that much, as she pulled in and out of the garage, day after day, in an exercise of someplace to go, something to do. And yet, I can still see her, hear her as she continued to live and yet die simultaneously. I will always see her standing by the garage watching me back out of the driveway. Her eyes brimming with tears, her happy, yet sad smile, as she stood waving goodbye to me. I would get this feeling of immense sadness as I pulled away. That feeling that life is so fleeting, so very very fragile. So I am now planting flowers and shrubs around her space, a garden for my beautiful mom. I am changing the colors of her walls and replacing the floors, the tile, adding a Dutch door creating a different feel to the place she called home. But most everything else, I am taking with me. Her club chairs, her old pine hutch, her paintings, her wedding ring, and the watch my dad gave her in San Francisco. They all remind me of her story. Who she was. Without question, my mother will never become invisible to me. She lives inside me in her very gracious way, safe in a very quiet spot inside my heart, and in the things she loved that I too love, she lives on.

A friend of mine's father died recently, and his mother then moved to an assisted living out of town. His parent's house sold quickly and he made the pilgrimage home to empty the house. He said he didn't really keep anything, that it was all their life and his life was somewhere else. We talked about the feeling of being orphaned when our parents die. Before, we always had a place to return to, until we suddenly didn't. Home in an odd sense of the word, becomes a foreign land. The houses and structures mostly remain, but the life that inhabits them is transient. All the most important moments of our lives, in an eerie way, haunt us and yet, are no longer tied to a place, but to an ache in our chest.

There once was a family that moved to my town when I was in junior high. Her dad was a doctor and her mom was this colorful person, always wearing a beautiful smile and a unique and lovely hat. They were outside people, golfing, running, playing tennis, always in the busy of going somewhere. Once their kids grew up and left the nest, the couple remained in their house alone, still immersed in life. Their children and their families visited often. Everywhere they went, they would add life and color, repainting memories from the past. One day, as I drove by, I realized they had moved or maybe had passed away. Their house looked so lonely and so quiet, so still. The life sucked out of it. These people took their magic with them. Someone else finally moved in, and yet, it in no way feels the same. The energy of their vivacious, gracious spirit is now gone. The color has faded in dimming shades towards gray.

Life is so hard to live, to describe, to mourn, to keep. We have limited time here. We waste so much time on duty and expectation, and if we are lucky, one day we wake up and realize the urgency of living a purposely rich life. We want to die and leave a piece of ourselves that someone will remember. We want our lives to matter. We are our energy, our soul, and it is an electricity that is felt. A place is a landscape that can change many, many times. It is the sound of our voices, the softness of our gazes, the deepness of our love that lingers. I have recently searched my ancestry. I learned many things about my dad's family that I never knew. One afternoon, I spent several hours at the Mars Hill University library where my great-great-grandfather was the first president. I looked at documents, letters, articles, and photos from his life. His energy was in the room with me. There was a thread to his words that were tied intrinsically to me. We are created from the lives who came before us. That is why we never change history or try to create new stories about our past. Our stories define us and link us to future generations.

So I have discovered that in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life he is correct:

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.

It is true, we can never really go back home. Home is now, and now is brief. All we really have is energy. And yet, knowing this is a kind of freedom.

We can take love with us, not the walls or the doors, but the feelings that we lived within them. And if we so desire, we can return to them again and again. As I drive familiar streets, I am somewhat invisible, unknown. Yet my soul remembers, and I have collected everything that really matters. I have felt homeless for quite a few years. I have grieved the loss of everything, and yet I feel whole. I am longing for a space, although knowing well its impermanence. I hope, however, to leave my energy for generations to come, not in things, but in my being. The fear is I might die too soon, actually before my last breath. I have vowed to live in the now, as each and every one becomes the current of my name. In my sentimental nature, I feel most everything, and yet I know no one knows, I am mostly obscure, and yet my love lives on in all that I love...a chair, a photograph, my words, a tree...all that is me...my life, a movable feast.

In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about Life. It goes on. - Robert Frost

- Patty Brown

Art - "Currents V" by Prudence Horne