Everything echoes

Everything.

A house emptied where once stood furniture, lamps, rugs, plants. Walls that have seen shades from pink to green to a grey-blue. Others that have seen a different shade of green, to another to a different grey.

Memories fill each room. Scents from coffee cakes made religiously in a bundt pan, the clanking of plates and silverware from many a meal.

Knocks on a door from visitors, family and friends. Laughter in the yard from a playground and pool that have long since been gone.

Closets emptied of clothes, shoes, books, jewelry, boxes of memories and trinkets.

All loaded up into trailers and vehicles and transported to other locations, onto the next place. Time marches on, nothing lasts forever.

It’s a tough thing, saying goodbye to a space you have occupied for the most part of the last two decades and then some. One where heights are measured on a door frame beneath a layer of paint, where chalk smiley faces are still stuck in the brick by the front door.

Remnants of what once was.

I don’t write this to be a sad thing, though it is sad in its way. How can entering and leaving your childhood home for the last time not be even a little sad?

I walked the rooms after most everything was packed and loaded, feeling the space, taking in the memories and remembering all the ways each used to look. The sound of footsteps creaking on the hardwood in a room filled with nothing but space.

Echoes.