Thursday, May 22, 2014

up at "home"

It's funny how, when you've lived away from somewhere that is/was technically "home" (Home in the sense that it's where my parents live, and home in the sense that I lived here while in graduate school), it's weird to call it "home." Someone once asked me, what do you think of as 'home'? and I guess I have to say it's now where I live in Oklahoma. I have at least as many ties (if not direct family ties) there as I still have up in Illinois. (It's kind of sad, every time now I come up for a visit, my mom will tell me about "remember Mr. such-and-such from church? He died a few weeks back." or "The Whoevers from your dad's old department moved to a different city when she got a new job." The town changes too. The old downtown is almost unrecognizable from the days when I was in grad school. I've talked about the places that are long gone from town before. There are huge numbers of large new (and probably expensive) student apartments where some of those places stood. ("Where is the Golden West of yesteryear?") I will say one thing hasn't changed - my parents' neighborhood is so much quieter than mine. I notice that. I really get caught up on my sleep here, not just because I don't have a schedule to meet, but because I don't wake up every hour or so when a dog barks or a "duallie" drives by. I'm keeping busy. I guess I have a hard time just relaxing - I mowed the lawn today, and I did a bunch of weeding for my mom. And between the two of us, we managed to put a couple of upper-story shutters back up that had come down in the wind. We did a little sorting in the garage, including finding some of my dad's old paperwork from his days at Akron. Apparently at one point he was looking into getting a pilot's license for some reason - he still has the card he got when he completed all the ground-work, but I don't think he ever actually got any flight time. (It just seems interesting now to me that he'd have done that. I guess I didn't pay attention to it when I was a kid, when he was actually doing it.) There's tons of stuff in the garage and I'm trying to urge my mom to let me help her go through some of it with her....the little specter hangs over my head of my brother and me having to do it someday, under probably more rushed and unhappy circumstances, and I'd just rather get through the dross and find the nice stuff now. (And I think of all my stuff, the hundreds of books and all the yarn, and wonder if someday my niece will get stuck sorting IT. I don't know. There is something to be said, I guess, for "living light," but then again, it's such a comfort to come home to walls lined with books.)

1 comment:

Charlotte said...

Maybe you could get your Mom to go through a bit of the garage each time you visit, that way taking it in little bites until the job is done. It could be the size of the job discourages her.