My mother died July 20, 2006, in the home she and Daddy had built together fifty years before. It was a happy place, and my brothers and I have a multitude of wonderful memories of growing up there, as do the five grandchildren, and probably the oldest of the great-grandchildren. Friends were always welcomed, so it was a constant beehive of activity.
Maybe that's why the house feels so strange now: the quiet, the stillness, the emptiness. After Mama was gone, Mac and William and I weren't ready to do anything, so we didn't. We'd tell each other, "Now if there's anything you want, you get it." But we didn't. For almost a year, it sat there, completely untouched; each of us was so afraid we might take something another one wanted, and besides, change was unthinkable.
Gradually though, we began to timidly claim things that have special meaning to us, always prefaced by, "Are you SURE you don't want this....". Mama would be pleased, seeing how so many of her favorite possessions are being assimilated into our lives.
It has been funny, seeing what is important to different ones. The most interesting has been Maxwell: he wanted his grandfather's old cardigan sweaters, and a couple of Mama's cookbooks, ones that have her writing scribbled in the margins, and recipes torn from magazines stuffed between the pages.
Max was only seven years old when Daddy died in 1987, but he remembers Daddy's wearing those sweaters. We only found one, one that I guess Mama just couldn't part with, and that Daddy had always been particularly fond of. It brought tears to my eyes, seeing Max standing there, so tall and handsome like Daddy, in that ancient robin's egg blue alpaca cardigan, but it would have tickled Daddy to pieces.
To be continued. Maybe.
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