The House Where I Grew Up

I know the place where I will die. I think I've known it since I first smelled the lilac bushes in the backyard, skinned my knee on the brick wall out front, grass stained my elbows in a delicious summer morning dew.

The day I will die is a Saturday in the early 1980's.

I am standing in the kitchen of my childhood home, the house my parents lived in for 43 years. The kitchen light switched off, adding coolness to the sunny afternoon. We rarely had the kitchen light off, mostly because my mother spent so much time baking or cooking here. Or, else it was my father who sat in the kitchen after supper, somber, a far-away stare in his eyes. He would sip tea in deep thought--anxiety, depression, a mind too restless for the life he's chosen for himself.

When I think of my childhood, this day always come to the fore.

The kitchen smells a bit like fruit, bananas, watermelon, apples--with a hint of lilacs from the bush outside our back door. The screen door is rusty and needs painted, screeches and smacks whenever it opens or shuts.

My father rummages in the back porch for towels. He's washing our car in the backyard. This is how I know it's a weekend. Dad is home and fussing with "fix-it" projects. Music plays on a radio atop the freezer, loud enough for him to hear but not upset our neighbors.

The song is Flight of the Bumblebee--the disco version--or, else it's B.J. Thomas. Perhaps it's Karen Carpenter asking why birds suddenly appear, or Crystal Gale wondering if it makes her brown eyes blue. I remember that same radio played the disco version of the Cantina song from Star Wars. Whatever the music that day, it was something easy and mellow.

A bag of Cain's potato chips crinkles on the kitchen table. Lunch was a meal of burgers, hot dogs, chips, and watermelon. A special meal. Grilling out meant that we would eat something we only ate on relaxed days. No school. No church. No other obligation than to enjoy the day.

I stand in the darkened kitchen and look into the sunny backyard, the Impala gleaming. The grass so green, towels drapped over the clothes line--I can already taste the cherry or grape popsicle that I come to seek.

How old am I in this memory? Four? Six? I can't be sure.

Why is this memory so powerful, reoccurring in dreams, in moments when I think of home? Nothing happened that day--no trauma, no exciting surprise--it was just a day.

I can still feel the breeze through the kitchen window and screen door.

The moment is suspended, hanging unattached, a few minutes loosened from context--a captured precious string of heartbeats of my simply being alive.

I will die on this day--as the moments of my life flash before me--I will finally be home when I stop at this memory. We are not temporal beings. Our fleshly casing snares us within the confines of time, but inside, in the secret places where we exist, Life is a mobius strip that twists back on itself, unbound, today can be yesterday.

This is the yesterday I cherish and relive. I don't even know if the moment is real or something I dreamt. Does such a thing matter in the end, I wonder?

My parents recently moved into a new house. The house where I grew up sits empty. When you climb the creaky stairs, the bedrooms where my brother and I spent so many moments listening to records and tapes, dancing in front of mirrors, debating, lost in the silence of depression and mental illness echoes each footstep, barren, except for the cracks and lines in the walls.

A week ago, I stood in each room and felt gigantic without the reference of furniture. No one who lives here now will know that a young man struggled each night with life and death. No one will know that a young girl would sit on the floor and scribble poetry, would sleep in her bed on summer nights, lulled by the hum of the fan in the window. No one will know that a middle-aged woman still sleeps in that room, in memories, in the dreams that fade as soon as I blink my eyes awake each morning.

We are the ghosts of this house. We are the presence the new owners will feel whenever they hear a floorboard snap in the night. We are the people who have never truly left.

I know the moment that will pass before my eyes when I die, and I know where I will be. The day will be sunny and bright. The smell will be of lilacs and cut grass. The last thing I will hear will be a song, the music inside me, the beat of my own heart that began on a Spring night one day in May.