certainty of impermanence

Memories for me are formed first by place.

I can remember not just the setting, but the architecture, the wall and floor treatments, the furnishings and their layouts, from places I visited or lived in years ago.

I also remember smells.

I can tell you exactly how my Grams had her house arranged. I can tell you what our house looked like before my parents reconfigured the living room, dining room and tiny bedroom.

I can remember the various houses my Dad (Dave) inhabited even though I never lived with him.

I distinctly remember my Great Grandma Mabel's apartment. Her small kitchen table, her recliner, how her bedroom furniture was arranged, her headboard, and that her home smelled like applesauce and Bengay.

The Children's Museum in Indy with the long ramps to the various parts of the museum. I recall them not from my adult visits but from the vantage of a child where my eyes could barely see over the sides on tip-toes. I remember reaching out to grab my sister's stroller as we walked down and down and down that path.

Hotel rooms, friend's old houses, places I worked, desks I sat at, condos on vacations, other museums, my Uncle's gas stations and tire store, the nursing home where my Grams stayed and various hospital rooms on that journey, and on and on. My memories almost always start with where. And where is tied so strongly to the building, the place.

As a child I struggled with being away from my home. Especially over night. It wasn't so much I wanted to be back with family, it was I needed my home to surround me. The only place I was next most comfortable was my Grams' house which was right next door.

I really would get homesick. I still do.

I was lucky to have a home that was safe, sound, warm (or cool), with family that while not perfect was stable and loving. A small room full of my books and things.
I am lucky today to have the same in my own home. More than one-room, of course.

Genius loci - "the spirit of place."

Beyond being able to tell you about the physical attributes of the place, I can recall the feeling those spaces created, caused or inspired. I have walked into spaces and immediately felt at home. My current home broke all my rules for buying a house but when we first walked in I knew who had lived here before the sellers at the time. I could feel her, and I was right about it being an older lady. She had made that house a home and that feeling continued to permeate throughout the very bones of the house and it persists today. I have also walked into spaces where I knew darkness had lived or tragedy had occurred. Felt the cold touch of the darkness that crept along the baseboards and curled up my leg. Attempting to hold me bound against my urgency to leave.

There is a presence and energy to every space.

My understanding of my place in my own history is tied to the very places I have been. My certainty of what is real so tied to the permanence of the my childhood homes. I have kept those images pristine for so long.

A few weeks I drove by my childhood and Grams' houses. It was all different. Trees shielded being able to see the homestead from the road. I could barely see down the long driveway to first my Grams' house and then ours. There were more outbuildings and a glancing view suggested that there is need of some serious landscaping. I wondered as I drove on, 'What have they done to the inside?'

I don't really want the answer. There is certainty in place, right?

When I was little my Uncle Darrell and Grandpa Wayne also lived in houses right next door to each other. So many memories of going between their houses to different toy rooms that were mostly all mine. Building snow forts in the giant snow drifts between their houses. Riding my bicycle on their driveways. So many Christmases, Thanksgivings, Easters, regular visits just watching random stuff on cable on the console TV. The horrible shag carpet. The dreadful dark paneling. The backdoor to both house leading directly into the laundry rooms. One car garages full of my ride-on toys and bicycles. The large corner lot yard that Grandpa mowed with his Snapper Comet red riding mower with the white seat. The cookies left on the 70s green counter top just where I could reach them.

Anne and I drove past them on the way to her parents house. I hadn't ever shown that neighborhood to her. Piles of garbage and huge brush pile in the yard between the houses, siding falling off, porches falling down, landscaping overgrown and parts of cars in the driveways. I wonder as I drove by with tears in my eyes, 'Oh my, what has happened inside?'

I don't want the answer.

Forty-eight years has shown me over and over that the only certainty is impermanence. Yet I have continued to clinging to the permanence of place. These unchangeable visions of what those homes looked like. The absolutes of the feelings they created.

Uncle Darrell and Grandpa Wayne were my Dad's (Dave) brother and father. That side of my family controlled was by addiction. Wayne and Dave both struggled with alcohol and the family unit around them enabled that for years. I watched from my safe space as I lived with my Mom and I lived it in my visits with them. But there was love, even if it was sometimes a broken or fractured type of love.

Those houses were where some of my best more cherished memories with them were born and lived.

My instinct driving past those houses was to find some way to buy them and put them all back because the state of them represented the very change in the nature of my relationship with that whole part of my family. That it fell to disrepair and ultimately to ruin.

It is uncomfortable, painful, scary, to live with the understanding that change is constant. We seek to avoid impermanence. It is all around us especially in places. Placards, statues, monoliths, towering buildings with names and dates plastered on them. Yes, some of them have persisted for years and will for years to come. But they have and will change.

Today we see how easily huge systems (good and bad) can be changed regardless of the norms or laws that have been built to govern them.

If we accept that everything is changing how do we find our grounding? First, it is in the acceptance of groundless. Second, that if all is impermanent and ever changing, we live as if today is the most precious we have ever and will ever have.