Saying goodbye to a house must happen in pieces. I said goodbye to my childhood bedroom when I moved out for college and my little brother painted over the pink walls. He moved into my old bedroom for a short time before moving into the room off the back of the garage for a much longer time, and then both upstairs bedrooms became guest rooms. After he moved out, three of the four rooms were left empty. Two became guest rooms and one my mother's quilting room. So if I started saying goodbye to my childhood home in the year 2000 when I first moved out, tell me why I broke down when my mother stripped the faded wallpaper from the walls in the bathroom across the hall from my old bedroom, the bathroom my brother and I shared all those years, a good five years after I had already left?
The house now belongs to someone else and according to my mother, they are in love with it. The new owners are apparently my age with two young children (apparently people my age have two young children), which means my parents are packing up the house they've lived in for twenty-three years this week. I am still trying to figure out what my problem is, since most of the furniture has changed, the carpets are all new, my dad has put new knobs on cupboards and new blinds on windows, my parents have a different dog now, drive different vehicles, and wedding photos hang on the walls from my wedding, my brother's wedding.
There are no babies yet, but the babies will never see this house. The babies will only know the new house. And certain things about this house haven't changed. The bush in the backyard (I can't forget to ask my mother what kind of bush) will continue to change color to an orange that all but sets it on fire come autumn and we will miss it this year, though my mother admitted to me several months ago that when they started building the new house and she knew it would be the last time she'd see it change, she took a photograph of the bush turned orange so she would never forget what it looked like. The tiny tree my grandfather gave our family shortly after our move to Bellingham in 1991 is still planted in our front yard, right there beneath the window of the office where my mother sits to do her work, but it has since grown to be a much bigger tree, and my grandfather has since passed away, gone more than ten years now. Will anyone know the significance of that tree? That tree, which was the small token from my grandparents, who stayed in California where we lived as small children, and came to visit several times a year until they became too old to travel; my grandparents who lived in their home for fifty years until my grandfather passed away and my grandmother could no longer live there on her own. That house in California with the orange trees in the backyard.
2812 Windsor Drive is the address I'd spout off right now if you were to ask me where my grandmother lives (not the Elder's Inn where she actually lives, never), and I am positive 916 36th Street will be the address I tell you five years from now if you were to ask where to find my parents, because that's the sort of person I am and that's the sort of person I'll always be, because I have known about this move for a long time and I was positive I said goodbye months ago when the process began, when I first saw the plot of land by the lake, when our family gathered there on Christmas to see the progress and it was raining so we were wearing boots and scarves and the house was still bare bones and freezing as my parents walked us, their grown kids with houses of our own, through the beginnings of rooms barely held together by boards of wood, describing to us in detail what would be where, showing us all the spaces for closets and fireplaces and where the stained glass window would go, and at some point during all of this I started crying and I squeezed my mother's hand because, as always, I could see all of it at once.
