Letting Go

I am sure that many of you have a memory of "home" when you were a child. The place where you had Birthdays, Christmas, where you learned to ride your bike. A wall where your mom or dad measured you against and wrote your name with a date to mark your growth each year. A grave in the backyard where your pet was buried, or other animals you found dead and felt they needed a proper resting place.

That's what me and my best friend, Donny Peterson, did after severe thunderstorms--find dead birds and bury them. We would make little stretchers made out of long grass and would run the little birds to their resting place--all without our dear mothers knowing what missionary work we did for the neighborhood.

But memories of home and the children we once were are lost in a place unreachable during the wakeful hours. Only visits during dream time do we find our old rooms, the safe places and beds that knew our little bodies as well as a mother's lap. And so now our children get ready to say goodbye to their names on the wall, the place where they first stood, first spoke, first puked. The familiar sounds of a certain cadence down the steps in the morning and the guessing game my husband I would play of, "Whose feet are those?" We will no longer hear at this house of five generations old.

Riley's bedroom set is sold, an antique piece of 100 years old. Refinished and repainted in a soft, pale yellow. As my husband pulled the headboard away from the wall I read an inscription on the back written in his handwriting. It read, "Rebuilt and repainted for Riley Larkin. Love, Mom 2003" The memories of her tiny body sleeping night after night on that bed left me standing in her empty room silent and afraid to cry... as this is the place where I know I will long to be in my old age. Letting go hurts.