Stories and Change
Cora and Clarence lived for many years in an old farmhouse on an acre of Iowa land. They rose early each morning, worked hard, raised children, tended to a garden and a lettuce patch and a small field of corn, and by and large were happy. After Clarence died and the children had grown up, left home, and started families of their own, elderly Cora did one last thing before moving into town: she torched the house.Cora's granddaughter Teresa told this story as we sat with two other dear friends, Donna and Christine, on the patio of a house by the seashore. (By the way, I've written about these particular friends, the bicycle girls, here, here, here...and undoubtedly elsewhere!)
Anyway, the day was waning, the sky was glowing, and stories were taking shape. I pictured Cora armed with a match and a can of kerosene, a tiny lady with long white hair and fire in her eyes. A chapter of her life had unequivocally concluded, and Cora wanted to put a final punctuation to it.
"You know what? I did the same thing to my wedding dress," Teresa confessed. "It felt good."
It’s impossible to predict what girlfriends will share while sitting around gabbing at the end of the day. The burning stories got me to thinking about change and how we handle it. There are those who do more than accept: they orchestrate, celebrate, and ceremonially mark it. Teresa has certainly become one of those people. Having weathered more than her fair share of challenges and survived, she knows that life is always in motion and she dances along with it, embracing the now, shining with her own inner light.
This get-together is in itself a marker of change. The setting is the home of Donna's mother Sue, who passed away in the fall, and Donna is in the midst of the difficult task of sorting things out and readying the house for sale. The house is situated almost on the sand, with windows that look straight to the sea and Catalina Island beyond. There is a tall skinny palm tree in front, and a sidewalk that hosts a constant procession of walkers, runners, skaters, and cyclists, whose random fragments of conversation often float to us like poems. It's strange to think the house will one day soon belong to someone else. But there is time for a few last gatherings, and this one of friendship and laughter is consistent with the spirit of the place, even if at times it feels poignant.
It is a house crammed with paintings, sculpture, and furniture, with photographs, books, and antique toys, with baskets, bowls and bric-a-brac. There's a skeleton room done up in Dia de los Muertos themed decor, another room with a hundred hats hanging on the wall, and all sorts of unexpected treasures and brightly colored objects everywhere you look, each with a story or a memory connected to it. Sometimes an abundance of things has a heaviness about it. There's a lot of stuff to deal with, and it weighs upon my friend. But the decor is evidence of a life well lived, and we are very aware of Sue's presence, along with the vastness of her absence.And there we were, drinking wine on the patio, watching the parade go by, feeling the sun on our faces, sharing stories. Speaking of burned or vacated houses, did I ever tell you that my family house on Long Island burned down? It was years after we had sold it, but there is still something shocking and strange about idly googling your old address and seeing images of the house engulfed in flames on the website of the local fire department. That's it in the photo.
I hadn't thought about that house in a long time, but now I was picturing it in vivid detail, room by room, and most of what happened was sad. Wouldn't it be nice if I finally didn't go to sad? What if I could shove aside those painful memories, stop tormenting myself for not doing more to make things better, and pat myself on the back for having come this far? Here is this lovely moment-- good for me for having reached it--and already it is slipping away.
"Where is it, this present?" asked the philosopher and psychologist William James. "It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming."
"All is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis," wrote Henry Miller. Best not to grasp too tightly. Travel light. Love mightily. Tell someone your stories.