As the mind wanders…

This is not a sad story.

Saying it up front kind of puts into question though, doesn’t it? Sows a little doubt maybe?

This is a story about home. It could be about your home or a friends home, but only you could write that post, or your friend. This is about scratches in the hardwood floors of a house in eastern Massachusetts, in a mysterious spiral pattern. It’s about a patch of wallpaper* where a younger you practiced writing your name. It’s about the front step and the proper angle of attack on the pile of snow from shoveling the walk. It’s about the tree you climbed high enough to look down on your two story house, before you learned your multiplication tables – and thus calculate the number of bones you could break if the potential energy became another kind of energy.

It’s about a plaster patch in the back of a closet, about the size of child’s foot. Or the industrial grade swingset in the backyard that may out live you. Or the broken cement roof tiles you’d swear would handle the force of a football, kicked from 25 carefully measured yards away.

It’s about projects large and small, like the new floors installed in the living room and all the bedrooms – and the back pain that came with it, free of charge. Or the small work of tinfoil art crafted to deflect the light of a fixture directly in front of a television. Or the pictures you hung in the family room, in places picked by the previous owners – no matter how well it fit your arrangement of stuff. It’s about the odd mirror you hung in an odd corner, the one your mother gave you shortly after you were married, before she lost her mind.

It’s about all the little memories hiding in all the little nooks, corners or cracks.

It’s about the feeling you get when you first think about leaving them all behind, to move to another place where memories are waiting to be made.

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* Ten or fifteen years after we moved, my sisters visited the old neighborhood and asked to have a look around the old house. The current owners (at the time) showed them a room almost completely free of wallpaper, save for a small square hidden by a dresser, where someone had practiced writing their name many years ago.