Aging

I drove to my grandmother's house today. She died five years ago and this is the first time I have driven to her house since then. I say "driven to her house" because I didn't go in. In the five years since she died there have been other residents in her home. I didn't agree with this but my family said it was better than having the house sit empty and rot. Now the other people are gone and the house is empty.

I'll never enter that house again. I have a great vivid fear that if I see it now, different because of years and other people living there, that the vision will push out some of my memories of the house. That it will push out the exact replica of it that lives in my mind. I remember the location of every piece of furniture. I remember the exact colors and fabrics. I remember the smell. I remember being able to stretch my arms straight into the air and touch the ceiling. I remember it exactly as it was and I never want to know what it's like now.

So I drove there today. Just a quarter mile past my aunt's house I drove on the gravel road I haven't driven on in years. I saw the woods and fields that were staples in my childhood. Round the final curve and I saw the barn where I spent every afternoon after kindergarten (back when kindergarten was only half day) and countless other days throughout my life. Watching when I was young, working when I was older, always being a part of my family's world. Now the barn is barely standing and it serves as the perfect reminder that the world I grew up in barely exists anymore.

Past the barn I pulled into my grandmother's driveway and parked. My stepmother is right. The house is so much smaller than it seemed before. So much smaller than it lives in my memory. How was it possible that every Sunday we packed every member of our family into that house for dinner? The house is aging and not beautifully. One day, if no one takes over the house to update and repair it, it will descend into the same state of rot and daily death that the barn is in. It will cease to be a house and will become a shack that will be torn down should I or one of my siblings decide we want to live on that piece of land.

I'm adult enough to admit that I sat in my grandmother's driveway and cried like the baby that I am. Not just because I still violently miss my grandmother and ache for conversation with her, but also because seeing her house and the barns and the fields and the land cemented what I'd been feeling for a while now. It cemented that that stupid clich� is true - you really can't go home again. Cause while you've been gone, home has Changed. It's changed at a pace slower than molasses pouring, so slow that those who are still there don't even notice it as a change. Yes they see that things are different from the way they once were but they see that it's growth or revision and not Change with a capital C. But you who have been gone, you who don't live there anymore, you who miss home and long for it in your memories and dreams, you see the Change. You see that the world you grew up in doesn't exist anymore. And it breaks your heart more than a little bit.