Closed doors

I drove by the first house I ever bought today; the one that's going to auction. The one that used to be his mother's, and still, even when we lived there, was. I went through the list of things we changed - which is nearly everything, literally, there is possibly one wall that remains standing that is original - how the house had changed us. Sitting at the curb, I took in the overbearingly large dogwood tree his mother planted, and didn't want us to trim. The cabinets she'd had hand done for her, thirty years prior but didn't want removed. How a battle ensued over everything - from the roof, with forty years of water damage, the incorrectly done electrical units, the unusable bathroom on the second floor, the torn linoleum in the kitchen. How I lived in the eight by ten foot dining room, vacuuming out japanese beetles from the bed everynight before retiring.

Let us not forget the horsehair plaster. The damn plaster that continued to settle, in it's inevitable way, for months after the work had been halted, the contractors no longer letting themselves in at six am, while I lay like a zombie, no longer caring if I was all the way tucked under the sheets anymore. I managed a smile, at the layers of wallpaper we'd removed, how I'd painted three rooms, late at night, as I could no longer stand to look at the walls. Taking in the downstairs, once I got past the threshold, was certainly not an easy task - those rooms still hold ghosts I'd thought long extinguished. But the hardest, was the upstairs. I passed the shelf where I'd had the family pictures displayed, stopping, with such tell-tale clarity, that something had occured, after H was 21 months old. The children in the pictures stopped growing. I think I wanted them to stay little, with their memory banks yet unfilled, to snatch back the time, and the unpleasantness, that occured in that house.

To be honest, I'm not sure what prompted me to wander through that veritable house of horrors; each room with a distortion mirror, that only reflected the memories I'd long since tried to banish. Maybe, that's the point: I've never fully gone through them. Letting things go, as my mom would say. I peeked into the room that was my children's, back when I had two children, both of whom I adored, loved with an abondon I'm not sure arrives for anyone but your children. It's fierce, and protective, and bigger than me. I painted that room, half pale blue for Fox, half pale pale pink for My Riley Jane, split down the middle of the window - so sheer were the colors, that most people knew there was something different, but couldnt' quite pin down what it was. Peering in, I could hear their laughter, and the cries for me in the night; smell their baby scent, hear their quiet breath as they slept. That's the hardest part of this whole raw deal: Riley. I lost a child.

And then, I stepped into what used to be my master bedroom. I turned in a complete circle.

Walked out. Closed the door.

Left the house. Locked the door. Drove away. Not once did I look back.

Some things, I think, are meant to stay behind locked doors