May 1, 2018 … the day came and went as they all seem to do, stopping for no one. Through the persistence of change, loss and death, we are repeatedly offered life’s lessons that what we cherish is all just on loan, a gift for just a short time. With the current passing of the ‘home of my youth’ to a new family, my musings led me to ….
Home… an archive of held memory.
Stories of births and death, laughter and tears, hellos and good-byes, celebrations, dances and song, dreams and nightmares, traditions and rituals, silence and noise, ordinary and extraordinary, questions and answers and all manner in between.
Bound by the confine of walls that rise upward to the rafters and downward into the foundation below … an archeological dig of the human story, stories that shelter the essence of lives lived, stories of a particular place in a particular time, stories that define and stories that free to become … each with its own author.
Memories welcomed or not, at a time of our choosing or without invitation, tour us back through the spaces and places we have called home.
In the smallest of drawers filled with any manner of hoarded artifact…buttons and bows, elastics and tacks, pens and Energizer batteries, string and scotch tape; in crowded closets of seasonal fashions … each cataloging a size long past its usefulness; in tattered boxes, stored Christmas wreaths and strings of lights, some that work and some that don’t…. each a look into the passage of time; spaces for love making , for sleep, spaces for sustenance, spaces for cleansing, disposal and silent retreat, spaces for play and spaces to gather….echoing through our aging memory its people, its coming and goings, its doing and being.
In eternal repose, memory but awaits the traveller …” Please come in, make yourself at Home.”
Karen Hirst
