To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.
~Henry Drummond
The first thing I wanted that morning was to drive. I can't express enough the freedom that came with driving. I was young and having the ability to just leave home left me with the most amazing feeling of exuberance. I didn't know where I would go or that I would end up where I did. There were just keys and my car with a full tank. I could go three hundred miles before needing to refuel. Highway driving, I could be anywhere in six hours.
My grandmother used to have a house in North Carolina. With her passing away the week before, the house was empty. No one had gone there yet to clean it out after my father inherited it. The keys were sitting on the counter. At six in the morning, the day was ahead of me.
When I got out of the car, standing before me was a the most magnificent home I could have ever imagined my grandmother to live in. With two sun rooms on either side of the house, two chimneys, an enormous porch and balconies on the second and third floor, the house was more of a mansion than anything. I had never been to her house before. When I opened the old door, the inside was furnished with antiques. Tan draperies hung from the windows blocking out the early afternoon sun.
There was a parlor which I found had one of the fireplaces. Twelve chairs with hand stitched cushions surround three tables. Grandmother had entertained here, I had to assume. Attached to the parlor was a door leading to the kitchen. The window stretched across almost the entire back wall. I leaned against the counter to look into the back yard. A garden full of flowers and intertwining pathways interrupted by fountains where water sat in my grandmother's absence was the view that my grandmother enjoyed while washing dishes. I could never imagine leaving this house.
I was barely at the house for twenty minutes before the cellphone in my bag rang. I dug through the clothes that I had stuffed into the bag for the ringing nuisance that was undoubtedly my father. At eighteen, I still wasn't free. He wondered where I was, when I was coming home, the funeral was tonight. I couldn't go. I wouldn't go. I refused to say goodbye to the woman who had knitted me so many blankets, told me thousands of bedtime stories when my father was away on business, who was the only maternal figure I had ever grown up with.
When I hung up the phone, I ventured upstairs to encounter the library, my grandmother's bedroom and a room with pink floral wallpaper that belonged to my aunt who passed away at age eleven. I imagined that my mother wept in here the first time she came over met my father's mother. I've been told my mother's sentimentality was something to be marveled, that she was a woman who could understand even the most painful of situations. Father says that she used to say "There is no difference in human pain. We all have the same emotions and we all have the capacity for complete compassion. Those who cannot fathom compassion are either ignorant or idiots." Had I known my mother, she would have been so much more than just my mother, she would have been my best friend.
As I stood in my aunt's old bedroom, a cough from behind me startled me into whipping around. A twenty-something boy stood in the doorway of my aunt's bedroom. The caretaker of the house, I assumed because my grandmother could not keep up with this large house at her old age. He stared at me, expecting an explanation as to my sudden appearance in this house and I was stunned into silence.
(to be continued)
