You Can Never Go Home Again

As a teenager I dreamed of the day I could leave my home town behind, choking on my dust.    And at the ripe old age of 18 I did.   Sure I came home from college for holidays and summers, but it wasn't the same.  I mostly didn't care because I was on to bigger and better things so the family and friends that I had left behind became less and less of a priority.  Then of course I got married to someone outside of my hometown which severed the home ties even more.   I try to go home  to visit my mom and sisters once a month, but every time I go, there is something new.  The town has transformed so much that it is almost unrecognizable.  My mom no longer lives in my childhood home either.  So the home I try to visit is not the one I knew.  My aunt now lives in my childhood home and I can visit it any time I like.  Guess how often I go there?  It's disturbing to walk through the rooms of a house that I knew intimately and barely recognize now.  The pictures that hang from the walls are not of me and my brothers and sisters.  They are of my cousins.  It's almost as if I never existed.   

Now 16 years after leaving home, the one constant I could always count on is gone. Yesterday I spent the day at my grandpa's house and he wasn't there.  A yard sale was in progress in order to sale off the unwanted items of his life.  I walked through the rooms of the home that he had built himself over 40 years ago, searching for something.  I'm not sure what I was hoping to find as I looked through rooms bereft of his things.  Several of the rooms had already been gutted and painted in preparation for someone new to inhabit them. My one constant is gone and I am left feeling adrift.

Grandpa and Me