Today is Mom’s birthday. She would’ve been 73. We would’ve gone to breakfast.
She passed last spring. We cleaned out her property—a little tan and brick ranch—and sold the house early last fall, less than a year ago.
Less than a week ago, Indiana was hit with what meteorologists have classified as a one-in-one-thousand-year flood. Our little town is devastated.
Floodwaters ravaged Mom’s neighborhood. They ripped the back of the garage off the house and tore away the tan siding, revealing the color it was when she bought it back when I was in junior high.
Blue. The house was blue.
That peeled-away siding peeled back layer after layer of memories in that house. Of my high school years. Friends. Family. Of Mom and all she was. The way the house smelled (burnt popcorn and a Glade plug-in). The squeaky floorboard in my bedroom. The fussy closet door that always jumped the track.
“It’s just a house.” A platitude meant for comfort. A nudge to remember to be grateful that no one was hurt. Things can be replaced. Structures rebuilt.
Just a house.
All the houses up and down that street. And the street over from that. And the next and the next. The sopping wet structures are just… shells.
But are they?
That wood and glass and brick that the flood wadded up and tossed downstream stood witness to births and deaths. Graduations and holidays. Sicknesses and recovery. Laughter and grief and every mundane day in between.
Each room, each knick-knack, and every kitchen junk drawer.
Though we know we carry our memories inside our beings, our “just things” have seen some things. Our “just things” are the pages some stories were written on.
***
As it happened, three days ago, I scattered Mom’s ashes. I haven’t decided whether it was impeccably bad timing or just right. With the flooded roads and flood of memories, it was quite the challenge.
The folks from Aerial Ashes came from Pennsylvania with a specialty drone to a small airfield in Ohio where we met up.
Mom liked jumping out of airplanes. I gave her one last jump and a quiet nod to the good chapters—and the dark ones, too. All parts of the same story.
Mom’s house was a novel spanning decades, then became someone else’s short story.
I don’t know what will become of it next.
It’s just a house, after all.
***
To all who’ve lost so much: May your stories be filled with enough hope to keep turning the page.
