Bah!

They have demolished my home. It's all right, really. I would have done the same if someone had dropped it in my lap. It was a big old dysfunctional, leaky, white-elephant of a thing. Still, it is so familiar to me that the thought of it being torn down brings me to the idea of someone saying to me, "You have to live in another body now." It's sort of the ultimate uprooting.

Please understand that it's more than just the obliteration of my formative physical environment, which alone would be traumatic enough, because it will not be just me who will be changed by this. In a way, five generations to whom this place gave meaning to the word, "home," will be altered, and these effects will interact and accumulate to each of us as individuals.

My long dead grandfather, who I never knew, sat on the front porch with my sister on his knee, and the front porch is no longer there, so his memory, for me, is altered in some way, perhaps because I know I will never sit there with my granddaughter on my knee.

Mother's portrait over the fireplace - one of the few, certain, permanent facts anchored deep in who we are, is simply no longer there and never again will be, because the fireplace itself is gone, and the walls around it.

Here's the thing… It is an immutable fact of life that people die. I have lost my grandparents and my mother, and my father is slipping away. And these losses are sad in a loving family, but somehow we accept them because we accept the inevitability of death. And we draw strength and happiness from their memory - memories which are largely framed by that grand old edifice. What I did not understand, until now, and what is so hard to accept, is that this place, this environment, this stage on which the memories are played out, has simply ceased to exist.

And here I've been thinking all along that this - at least this - will always be there.

My Tara; my Manderly.

Note: If you want to see it, click here. For those of you who did not know it, perhaps it will not mean much. For those of you who did, perhaps it will mean too much. Caution is advised.