Mom and Dad’s house, a two-story white farmhouse with a wide front porch, sat on four and a half acres with some trees, a couple barns, and a garage. It was built by my great-great-grandfather, the one whose name is in the front of the box of antique books I just went through.

This place is where I lay gingerly balanced in a rope hammock, reading every Nancy Drew, and where I watched The Hardy Boys on Sunday nights. It’s where Mom chronicled our mundane life with daily notes on the kitchen table in thick, spiral-bound notebooks—“put away laundry, I’ll be home at 2.” It’s where Dad walked across the back yard to his studio building to paint every morning after breakfast, and where we rang the old-fashioned dinner bell to let him know supper was ready. It’s where I mowed the grass in a tube top, like no redhead should ever do—ever—the crispy burnt skin ensuring I wouldn’t be asked again. The loop around the property I rode on our three-wheeler is muscle memory—the slight rise in the front yard where there was once a brick walkway, how if you gather enough speed and hit the bump just right it’ll loft you into the air. Just a little, but enough to make it worth doing—over and over and over again. Thankfully, I also knew where to duck so I wouldn’t be decapitated by the clothesline. I know where the grass grows greener along the septic tank line, where the bees linger, and where the hollyhocks grow.

It’s where my bratty sister Kerry and her friend Jennifer peeked through the stained-glass transom window over my door to spy on me—or read my diary if I wasn’t there. It’s where I lay late at night on the floor of my room, writing prayers in the wedge of light from the hallway. It’s where I cried myself to sleep listening to Nazareth’s “Love Hurts.” And it’s where Tim and I had our first Christmas together, where I learned to carve out space for “us” instead of “me.”

It’s where I had my first drink (way too young). It’s where I slammed doors and fought Mom and cut my thumb carving a linoleum block and made silkscreens and took 4-H photos. It’s the place I longed to escape from, where I wrote papers for scholarships that would take me away, into this wide world and out of small-town minds and hearts.

And it’s where I returned with my kids to play Tripoli on a hand-drawn game board every Christmas. Where silver hooks jut out from the brick fireplace mantle, holding the needlepointed stockings my mom and grandma made, filled to overflowing. Where my grandma fell asleep in her wheelchair after dinner, mouth wide open and head crooked back, snoring so loud my mom wanted to strangle her. It’s where my kids pulled out the ice bucket full of loose change and rolled quarters and pennies, where they played Kings in the Corner and shrieked with laughter at Dad’s nonsensical rhymes, and where Gran read them But Not the Hippopotamus before bedtime.

I know the ten-degree rise in temperature when my head crests the curve of the stairwell, and the dusty smell of the attic—the fear of falling through gaps in the floorboards and illicit pleasure of scavenging for forgotten treasure. I’ve memorized the view out my upstairs bedroom window, the only place we could watch for the school bus because the fields of corn between us and the house before us on the route were so tall.

I know at what point the motion sensor light on the porch will come on, and just how far the spotlight illuminates the driveway before giving way to pitch darkness. I know which cookbook held the hundred-dollar bills Mom stashed for an emergency, and how cold the kitchen floor is on winter mornings, and how the sun slants across the field on the other side of our road in the evenings. I know how Mom sat on the porch swing that provided that view, reading the paper, settled and at home.

And how home was the only place she wanted to be when she died.

I remember my brother-in-law, Doug, sitting on the kitchen counter the night she passed, warning us not to watch them carry her body out, because he has never been able to erase the image of them carrying away his own dad. I remember how empty the dining room looked once they wheeled away the hospital bed and how none of us could ever forget it had been there.

I know how Dad wandered the house, sad and lost, for months after she died. All of this is forever imprinted in my mind, but I was just starting to come to terms with losing Mom when Dad decided to sell the house. And that damn sneaky, slippery darkness dragged me right back into the thick of my grief.

I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised, though. I had expected him to end up with Rita since the week after Mom died.

Sitting on the front porch, I am surrounded by muggy air, insects humming, pieces of grain floating in the breeze. As I sit in Mom’s beloved porch swing, I take it all in. The fields across the street, the slightly rolling lawn Dad needs to mow, the bees buzzing as they move from one hollyhock blossom to the next.

It’s wrong that Mom’s not out here with us. It’s wrong that she’s no longer anywhere. Kerry sits beside me, and we coordinate our swinging motions as the swing creaks on its chains.

Rita and Judi, Mom’s friends from high school, flew in for the memorial service. Most of their group married doctors and belonged to country clubs and built ever-larger houses. As the story goes, Mom and Rita were together when they first saw my Dad with a group of his friends. Mom called dibs on the redhead. (She got him.)

Mom didn’t see these friends much except at the occasional reunion, which she agonized over because she’d “gotten fat” and had nothing to wear. She usually came home talking about how status-conscious they all were, as she pulled on her favorite sweats in her unfashionable beige-and-country-blue farmhouse.

When Mom got sick, though, those friends came from other states to help. Rita, who lost her husband to cancer eight years earlier, sent email updates to our extended circles so that Mom wouldn’t have to—and later, because Mom wasn’t able to. Judi was a teeny-tiny but fierce and funny “princess.” When she visited, Mom insisted on putting her in a hotel to save her the indignity of traipsing through the drafty, creaky old house to use the one full bath, illogically located off the dining room. This time, Mom didn’t even know she was here.

As I slowly rock back and forth, I watch Dad and Rita standing just a few feet away.

“It’s going to be so hard, Rob,” Rita says. “Winter will be bad. Trust me on this.”

He’s never done well in winter anyway. To counter his seasonal affective disorder, he usually planned golf trips in the southwest or jaunts to Vegas with his buddies, letting the sunshine rarely seen in Indiana that time of year boost his mood a bit.

Dad and Rita walk down the concrete porch steps and circle around to the side of the house. Rita was still convincing him. “Rob, you should come visit. Let’s make plans now so you have something to look forward to. We’ll play golf. The sunshine will do you good.”

As I listen, I imagine the two of them getting together. I look at her, not as my mom’s seventy-year-old friend, but as a woman. Objectively. Trim, well-dressed, sporty but quality clothing, suntanned skin. Lines on her face from smiling all the time. I can see that she was once quite beautiful. She’s still beautiful.

No, I think. Even if he liked her, he would never move to Florida. Dad’s not like that. He wouldn’t leave us.

But she was most definitely interested in him. Seriously? I think. We haven’t even buried Mom yet. What is wrong with you?

Nine months later, after Dad returned from his second trip to Florida to visit Rita, he invited me to have coffee at a local café.

“We’re in love!” he declared. Trying not to look too happy about it, he couldn’t help laughing.
“I’m not surprised at all,” I told him.

When my dear friend Terri’s husband died, she explained an aspect of grief I’d never considered. As one-half of a couple, she was a particular person—but with the other half gone, everything changes. Even if she found someone new to love, she would never be that same person again. Though I was happy for my dad—really, I was—I mourned the loss of the man he used to be, the one who was the other half of my mom. The one who never would have dreamed of leaving the part of the country where his family was in order to go dancing on Wednesday nights at the Club, have dinner with friends, and start wearing loafers with no socks.

But that was his new life. When he called, he talked about buying a Lexus like Rita’s. He detailed his golf foursomes and his plans to fly home to attend the IU basketball game with Rita’s son. He referred to Rita as “She”—he never used her first name with us. The capital S was implied. She wants this. She said that. She thinks I should do this.

Many evenings, instead of cooking supper, Kerry, Doug and I sat around coffee table drinking Cabernet, trying to make sense of things.

“Has he always been like this?” one of us would ask.

“It’s like he’s a chameleon,” someone else would say.

“Was he unhappy all along?” we would wonder together.

But no. He loved his life with Mom. He was content to putter around his studio and bring home a painting, hoping to wow Mom but often receiving only a tepid response. He willingly slurped the homemade soups she fixed for dinner on cold days and watched TV while she read her latest library book in her Lands’ End robe, a blue can of Cheese Puffs beside her. He played golf at less-fancy courses and taught workshops and rode his ATV and ate bacon and egg sandwiches at the diner while shooting the shit with the local farmers. The relaxed pace, the assurance that he was doing what he loved, and the low-pressure schedule—it was just what he wanted.

While he had it, at least.

Honestly, I think that was part of the appeal. Rita wasn’t a pale facsimile of his old life, but something entirely new—with friends who didn’t know him as Ann’s husband. Things were good, but he couldn’t sleep at night worrying about who would mow the grass at the house up north and whether he lost any tree limbs in the recent storm. The moment the house went on the market, people threw offers at him, and Dad scheduled a big sale.

In writing, a sense of place matters. Your story can’t be floating in a void; it roots the narrative. The setting doesn’t have to drive the story, but it can help define the character and her actions. I’d already lost so much, and without a physical place for my memories to reside, I felt like those were at risk too.

When I was in my early twenties, I cleaned out my cupboards and had a yard sale. I had this ugly little porcelain figurine of a cherub with an artist’s easel. It had always been in my bedroom, but I never liked it, so I affixed a $2 pricetag. A woman picked it up. “Is this really two dollars?” I replied yes as Mom said, a bit too loudly, “NO!”

Mom went on, “That is an antique. It’s really valuable. It belonged to my Pap Smullen.” Embarrassed, but determined not to make things worse, I told the lady, “Sorry. This isn’t for sale.” She sniffed, “Then don’t put it out,” and huffed her way down the driveway to her car.

That figurine now rests on a shelf in the antique hutch in my kitchen. It’s as ugly as ever.
One day I searched online. It may be worth more than two dollars—but valuable? If I find just the right buyer on eBay, I might get $60. Marie Kondo would be disappointed in me for holding onto an item that spurs feelings of shame. But getting rid of it feels like a betrayal.

I’m haunted by the stories I don’t know. The lack of information renders the objects meaningless. No one alive can identify the faces in the sepia photos in my attic. But letting go of them like they don’t matter feels impossible. I fill every corner of my home with furniture and random things like a carved wooden duck decoy that my grandparents kept on their living room table. I hold on to it all so tightly, grasping blindly for that missing connection.

It’s surely the next best thing to having them here, right?

The night of the big sale, I notice that the custom ceramic mugs I had made for my parents one year, with their names stamped into the clay, are on the sale table.

I shove them into my purse.

All of us smile and greet people as the auctioneer makes his way through the room, selling boxes of dishes and old bicycles and Dad’s mowing tractor. Bittersweet but bearable.

Until I see what was up next. I grab Tim’s arm. “Oh my God! That’s the bassinet that everyone in my family has slept in! It shouldn’t be in the sale!”

He very calmly says, “I’ve got this,” and stands up. I try to stop him; Mom taught me not to make a fuss in public. Once people realize family is bidding, they stop, and before long, Tim loads it into our vehicle. One of my great-grandfathers built it, and my grandmother, mother and uncle slept in it. When Kerry’s and my kids were born, my grandmother made sure we took pictures of them sleeping in it, and now, their kids have slept in it. Five generations in all.

Sometimes, I guess objects do matter.

Still, though, my house fills with more than I need, the weight of what I don’t know, the burden of holding on to all that I have.

Maybe eventually I will find ways to memorialize the people I have loved that don’t clutter my home but instead overflow my heart.

And perhaps someday I’ll even accept that I won’t need that house to feel like I have a home.

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