Attachments

We all have them, the things or places or people that keep us grounded. Leaving them behind or watching them slip away can be like being ripped out by our roots and carelessly thrown aside, all the more so when it's not our decision.

A house you've grown up in can be that way - even if you leave it behind, you expect it will always be there in time of need. You can close your eyes and see its details room by room, remember its warmth and comfort, the color of the paint or wallpaper, the furniture, all the first things that happened there, how each picture hung on the wall, the music that played and how the sun came through the windows. To know you can't return is bitter. And yet, it's still just a house, just stone and lumber and design and memories. Surely, the emotional contents are of more value - the things you can take with you and hold in your heart.

I stand in the driveway, feeling the sun and listening to the ocean, knowing that strangers now live there, people I don't know who can't possibly appreciate the importance of the house or the connection I feel to it. I feel dislocated and displaced and terribly sad, as if I have lost something dear, a part of me I thought would always be there is now in someone else's hands. No one asked me about letting this old house go, it was there one minute and gone the next. The voices of my grandmother and my daddy are gone as well, the quarrels silenced, the laughter too distant to be heard. There is a sense of betrayal here where once there was permanence and great joy. It's time to move on, I know, a home is more than bricks and favorite rooms and forgotten voices, more than just childhood.

The grass in the front yard is high, the windows cloudy with dust and salt spray, the path to the road overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. Here I came of age, fell in love a half dozen times, learned to read, came to understand baseball, took my first pictures of the boats in the passage. Here I grew up, beside the ocean, summer after summer and sometimes into the fall. Here is home, no matter how much distance there is between us, no matter how many years away I may be.

There have been a dozen houses since, moves and marriages and changes, some of my own making, some not. My attachments to things and places and people formed, were broken, and formed again. The house has stood through it all, weathering storms and surviving intact and unchanged - this is my foundation and so will it always be.