Goodbye to the house that used to be a home.

There is an odd sort of emotional exhaustion to quarantine. Though we go nowhere, I find myself doing a lot each day and so at night I’m the kind of tired when I just sort of fall into bed and sleep overwhelms me. There is no gentle drifting. I am just awake and then asleep and then awake again. It’s a very jarring, sort of matter of fact process. And in between occasionally I will stop and really notice certain things if for no other reason than during this very busy and very not busy time, it seems to be a season that has afforded me more time for all the noticing. The laundry in my neighbor’s yard blowing in the breeze. An actual woodpecker in my tree this morning. The way that my grapefruit smells after I first cut it open.

Have you ever cut a grapefruit for someone? Has someone ever taken the time to cut you a grapefruit? It’s actually an extremely precise and painstaking process where you have to make sure you go in between and on the side of every single piece of white fleshy fruit that tethers the juicy goodness to the skin. Whenever I would wake up in my parents house in Florida, I would almost always awake to a freshly cut grapefruit. My mother, being my mother of course, had a knife and spoon set designed exclusively for grapefruit cutting and eating because she was a person that always had things like grapefruit spoons and pickle forks. You could say a lot of things about her, but be damned if she wasn’t always going to use the right cutlery at the right times.

She would greet me in her striped bathrobe and we would eat grapefruit and look at the water behind the house that was truly the house of her dreams. My father would be in the background, puttering around as dads often do with paperwork or something in the garage, checking his camera or refining his tennis game. I can’t explain it but when you were there with them in that house, you were safe. It was one of those places in the world where when nothing made sense, you knew you could go and there would be my parents, playing the roles they had been destined to play their whole lives: steady, loving. Making plans for the day. Cutting grapefruits. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been longing for that place in my mind lately, the one where everything is steady and makes sense.

I remember a card my mother gave me long ago when Phil and I moved into our very first rental house together. “Have fun making it your own,” she wrote. 

Oh, indeed she did.

It was at that house that my mother opened the door for the very first time to meet the man who would one day be my husband. In that living room, she held my son in her arms for the last time before she died. It was there that my father took my children fishing and swimming. It was in that bedroom that I watched home movies with both of them. It was where I would sit on the patio at night long after she was gone, listening to the dishwasher whir as it washed my childrens’ baby bottles and flipping through her recipes, searching for her in their crinkled pages and the Florida night sky. It was the spot where my father read my children the very same bedtime story he read to me as a child, with the same hilarious delivery eliciting a new generation of laughs. It was there that we prayed at the altar of the sands and the waves, collecting shells with my mother, and making castles with my father. It was there where, even for a little while, that I got to see them live the life they had always wanted in the sunshine, by the water. 

My mother would often remark that a house is just a bunch of walls but home is wherever your family is. This house used to be their home, but is now just memories and stuff. I was supposed to wake up in Florida this week with my sisters to pack everything up and say one last goodbye. But instead a bunch of moving men picked through what was left of their lives without us last week, boxing up family albums, dishes and golf clubs. There was no time for ceremony and sentiment. Everything went on the truck or on the curb. The movers arrived here in CT yesterday with the contents which will remain in storage for a while until we can sift through it. I can’t see very much inside the packed unit other than a car seat that was used to drive around vacationing grandchildren in what now seems like another lifetime, and their well loved beach chairs. I can’t really reach any of it and of what I can, it is of course now useless. An oddly fitting end to the house that used to be a home.

Phil is fond of telling me often whenever we are reluctantly preparing to leave some place - a wonderful vacation or time with family, an amazing restaurant or whatever it is - he loves to remind me that no matter what, we can always come back. As someone who has a hard time with change and goodbyes, I've welcomed his optimism. Maybe we won't. Maybe we'll never be back. But maybe, just maybe we will. And that tiny sliver of hope has made it possible for me to move on to new people and places and things. I'm not afraid to let go anymore because I let myself believe that somewhere deep down inside I just might not have to. But this time in the silence of quarantine and the quiet rhythm and comfort of lies we tell ourselves, this one is different. They don't live there anymore. And the person I was when they did is gone. Sometimes you come back. And sometimes you move on.

This season of life is of course filled with so much pain for so many and so in the scheme of things, saying goodbye or not getting to say goodbye to a house hardly ranks anywhere near the top of hard goodbyes right now. So I head downstairs in the home my husband and I have built together. I Facetime my Dad. I check the weekend weather to make sure it will be favorable for a visit to the cemetery. In the kitchen, I cut myself a grapefruit, carefully separating the fleshy inside from its leathery exterior. It is sweet and sour and juicy and tastes like sunshine. Though entirely worthwhile, I am struck by how the process of carefully pulling the whole thing apart can be such a delicate, and messy endeavor.