The house by the river is gone. (Obviously the house by the river is not gone. It’s brick and tile and concrete; and my children might stop in St. Mary’s one day with their children and say, “That was my grandparents’ house. But it was much larger back then.”)
But it is gone from me, and now it is gone from my mother and my sister and my brother. I wonder what happens to a place when you can’t be present in it any more. Best I can tell from physics, action heats the air, which causes it to expand, so a house stays puffed out to its correct size. When you’re gone for awhile the air cools and the house shrivels in on itself, which is why all grandparents’ houses are absurdly small, like playhouses, when you drive by them 20 years later.
What is also gone is the stage upon which we played out our adult relationships, so now this is a road show. Now we have to get organized, make plans, articulate desires. We have to puff up a place on the fly, without the scripts and props we’ve been using for 20 years. Now it’s our show.
