GOODBYE TO MY HOME
Today is the last day that my house, Kathe’s and my home, is my house. Tomorrow at 2 pm I will sign papers and it will belong to Mars and Danielle Landis. It is really a bittersweet moment.
It was always Kathe’s house. She had always wanted to live there and when the Rath sisters sold it to the College, as they were required to do, and we came to the head of the list through seniority, to buy it, she was tremendously pleased. I remember the day we moved into the empty house in 1990, the day the Gulf War in August of 1990 started. These were huge events in the outer world but the house was ours, and became the center of our private world. It was home. We slowly bought furniture and made it our home for the next 30 years. It was not where our children grew up, that was in a college provided house on the Warren Wilson campus. This house was our own house. We gradually filled it with more and more more possessions, each possession connected to a memory. Kathe had one of the three small bedrooms as her knitting room and gradually it became clear full of knitting materials and craft materials. The bay window room was guest room and a place to store things. We sat on the back deck in the evenings looking out at a marvelous view. Kathe gardened outside as her mother had gardened back in Germany. I used the dining area as my place to sit and write, Kathe had a recliner where she sat to knit every day. As she knit, which was creative, but repetitive, she had the tv on and in these last years watched MSNBC. Home was Home. We felt comfortable there. We were entwined with each other and were encompassed by the house and all of the things we loved. It was very good.
In the last years of Kathe’s life we considered someday moving to a retirement home where we would have everything taken care of for us and constant companionship with other people, if one of us died and the other were left alone. But besides getting on the waiting list at Highland Farms, a retirement community where my mother spent her last twenty years and died, we made no effort to move.
We knew it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t. Kathe died suddenly and I was alone and the house and all of our accumulated things became an increasingly heavy weight and it was time to downsize and move closer to Susie and Tom, my children.
I couldn’t move in the year or two after Kathe died in the living room. And because there was no reason to rearrange anything in the house I left things just as they were when Kathe died. But finally living in Marshall with people all around me became attractive and an apartment opened up after Helene and I knew it was time to move. I finally could move without regret.
But today, on the last day that the house is still mine, a house that is stripped bare of all the things we collected and loved, I am sad. I am happy to be in Marshall, and I am stimulated by starting a new life of travel and actitivies. We, I, have to let go of the past and anticipate the future at every point in our lives. The past is always receding and the uncertain future is beckoning, but at times like this the past comes back and sweeps over me in an almost overwhelming way. I know I can’t hold on to it. For months now, as I have sorted through things, I have been letting go. The move is over and the house is just a shell, bare walls. But, today, is a reminder of what I am letting go of and a reminder that the future I anticipate will soon be the past. Today I feel loss of the past with more intensity than on other days. Tomorrow the house will be someone else’s to fill with things they love and to make a home, tomorrow they begin the anticipated future, and today, and tomorrow I face the turn in the road that reminds me of the past
For months I’ve fretted about the price and if I was being practical and selling the house for what I could or should. But today the house can’t be valued in dollars, which seem irrelevant. Today the house represents a connected web of of intense experiences and deeply felt emotions of the last 35 years that I am leaving behind, today the house is almost human, and I simply feel a deep sadness as I let go and say goodbye.
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BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 