Going Home Again
So, I'm back in Florida visiting my mother. I haven't been here since Christmas and I pretty much slept that entire vacation because I was sick with the flu and wishing a quick death upon myself (or for my nose to clear up, I didn't much care which.)
It's nice coming back here but strange. Sitting in the living room where my father died two years ago this past March, walking down the hall where he would carry me around by my ankles as a kid, going into the backyard where we'd grill steaks and he'd let me sip on his beer...and now, it isn't the same. At all.
Of course him being dead makes things not the same- but that isn't even what I mean. When he died my mother took a large part of the insurance money to fix the house up. It started as I was moving to New York, soon after his death to escape things, and continued on from there so I didn't see the gradual change but the huge suddenness of everything being different when I came back to visit.
I grew up in this house my entire life- we got a new couch, sure, painted a few walls from Eggshell to Whitewash, but otherwise things stayed the same. I moved in September 1st of 2007 to New York on a whim and help from a friend. I came back to visit in October 25th of 2007 and everything was different.
New title, kitchen redesign, new bathrooms, and all new furniture. And I do mean -all- new furniture. See, my parents were very poor when they first started out. They bought a house, got married on a whim on Valentines day because their marriage license they had applied for a year prior was about to expire, and realized they had no money. So, instead of doing a standard honeymoon they purchased some 'build it yourself' furniture and spent their honeymoon trying to make me and furniture. All this nice wood furniture that is, well, gone.
Now I'm sitting here in a twin size bed that I did not grow up with, in a room full of things that I never touched, on tile that is cold, pale and different than the one I learned to walk on, in a house that is just a shell of childhood memories replaced by something new.
It's nice coming back here but strange. Sitting in the living room where my father died two years ago this past March, walking down the hall where he would carry me around by my ankles as a kid, going into the backyard where we'd grill steaks and he'd let me sip on his beer...and now, it isn't the same. At all.
Of course him being dead makes things not the same- but that isn't even what I mean. When he died my mother took a large part of the insurance money to fix the house up. It started as I was moving to New York, soon after his death to escape things, and continued on from there so I didn't see the gradual change but the huge suddenness of everything being different when I came back to visit.
I grew up in this house my entire life- we got a new couch, sure, painted a few walls from Eggshell to Whitewash, but otherwise things stayed the same. I moved in September 1st of 2007 to New York on a whim and help from a friend. I came back to visit in October 25th of 2007 and everything was different.
New title, kitchen redesign, new bathrooms, and all new furniture. And I do mean -all- new furniture. See, my parents were very poor when they first started out. They bought a house, got married on a whim on Valentines day because their marriage license they had applied for a year prior was about to expire, and realized they had no money. So, instead of doing a standard honeymoon they purchased some 'build it yourself' furniture and spent their honeymoon trying to make me and furniture. All this nice wood furniture that is, well, gone.
Now I'm sitting here in a twin size bed that I did not grow up with, in a room full of things that I never touched, on tile that is cold, pale and different than the one I learned to walk on, in a house that is just a shell of childhood memories replaced by something new.