Home

My dad is finally selling the house we've lived in for the last decade. After years of moving from military bases to base around the world, it was our first real house. We bought the land, designed the interior (as much as you can "design" in suburbia), built the place and moved into the American dream. There was a dog.  A garden.  Cathedral ceilings, and a white picket fence.   I was away at college when my family first moved in.  It wasn't long before September 11 turned our worlds upside down.  One month later, they found my mom in that house, dead in the upstairs bathroom. I graduated college and moved into the house for 2 years, until me, my brother, and my dad felt solid enough to stand on our own again. Over the years, coming back home meant coming back to Virginia Beach, a place I've never grown up to know -- but whose identity I've slowly glimpsed over summers, spring breaks, and long weekends.

I spent last week helping dad and Jon clean out the attic. Box after box came down the ladder. Didn't know we were such packrats.  Overwhelming temptation to "loiter in the backyard of the sentimental" (as someone's accused me of doing) -- we found old VHS tapes, cassettes, photos, all evidence of "Life When We Were a Different Family."  Sometimes it was just me, mom, and dad.  That was before Jon came along.  Then it was the 4 of us, all together.  Then it was just me, dad, and Jon.   I really hated the way all our photos were out of order.  Separated from orderly photo albums, piles of pictures taunted me with their chaotic jumble.  I picked up a stack.  It's a picture of mom in the 80s, after Jon and I are born, her hair close cropped in a Korean perm, wearing an inverted-triangle power-suit, broad shoulder pads in bright colors. Then it's a picture of her in the 70's, a single woman, bell bottoms and long free-flowing hippie hair to her butt.  She's still called Daisy then and her friends draw her name with illustrations of the flower in simple yellow & white. Then, abruptly -- it's a close-up photo of my mother's face in a coffin, an unflattering angle that reveals an eyelid not quite shut, a line of white revealed. Her face spread wide with gravity and lifelessness. Blue lips, tinted by rouge. Stiff arms, wedged neatly into the box. In comparison, the scarves we draped around her look softer than ever, falling with gentle curves, the best shroud we knew how to make. An old brown Bible is propped up in the white satin of the coffin lid.  A few family photos too. This could be the dashboard of her car. This is how we transport her to heaven.

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