Home (07-16-07)

In July of 1976, my parents packed up our house in St. Louis and transplanted my sisters and I across the state of Missouri to a new home in Kansas City. Thirty-one years later, almost to the day, I have left home for the last time. In a few months, my mother will be moving a retirement community in Overland Park and this weekend will most likely have been my last visit to the house where I lived for twelve years and where I visited for the last nineteen.

On one hand, I feel relieved. I have been told many stories of aged parents who, for reasons related to declining health, had to be forcibly removed from their homes by well meaning, but heart broken children. I know that my sisters and I are darn lucky to have a mother who is so strong and wise. Instead of waiting for the inevitable progression of life, she has decided to meet the future on her terms. She researched and picked a retirement community that would place her minutes from my sister’s home in Overland Park, allowing her to live independently while she is able, but with the medical and nursing services to provide for any future needs.

I cannot tell you just how impressed I am with my mother’s cool common sense and capable management of her life. My sisters and I are being spared some truly awful decisions and we are fortunate indeed to have such a reasonable parent.

Yet, part of me cannot help being just a little choked-up. As my wife and I drove away for what will probably be the last time, an unwelcome lump formed in my throat and I found my eyes suddenly in need of wiping. I was swept by a completely irrational wave of emotion, a sense of nostalgia that I never before had for the old house on Morningside Drive.

There were some pretty good memories created there. Our house had seen its share of holidays, birthdays, weddings and even a funeral, along with innumerable other family gatherings, countless meals around the dining room table, and many songs around a piano that held the ever-expanding collection of family photographs. I played with my first dog and buried my first goldfish in the backyard, played football with various nephews and nieces in the front, and shot thousands of baskets (including some imaginary game winners) at the backboard over the garage. I learned to drive a stick shift in the driveway and I learned even more through the homework help I received in the living room. During endless summers, my sisters and I spent many an hour playing kick-the-can with the neighborhood kids or pretending to run “Club 6130” around the saloon bar that previous owners had built in our basement rec-room. We walked or bicycled around that neighborhood a thousand times and, all in all, it was a pretty good place to call home.

Of course, I have found that the older I become, the more time softens the negative and embellishes the positive. Not all the times were so harmonious but now every memory seems colored like a Norman Rockwell print.

I also know that it isn’t just the house and the yard and the neighborhood that I will miss. As my utterly practical mother has repeatedly pointed out, all of the property and its belongings are just stuff. Just stuff. You can’t take it with you. It is all just stuff and once the move is made, Mom will be very content to have a lot less stuff in her life.

What I will miss the most is the sense of home. Yes, my wife and I have created a wonderful home and, yes, we will be welcome in my sister’s home every time we go to visit Mom at her new home. I have always known that, figuratively, I could never go back, but now, literally, I will never be able to go back to my childhood home.
Fortunately, I can still look back fondly at all the good times and be thankful that my wonderful mother will soon be somewhere she can enjoy her remaining years free of the burdens of home ownership

So, thank you, Mom, for the loving home you created. May your new home be as good to you as the old one was to us. We’ll be down to visit, and as always, we love you.