Breaking Up the House
Every time I go back home, my mother
tells me I should begin to think now about what I will and will not want – before something happens and I have to. Each time
I refuse, as though somehow this is an argument we’re having. After all, she and my father are still keeping the house they’ve kept for half a century. But I do know why she insists. She has
already done a harder thing than I will
have to do. She was only eighteen –
her mother and father both dead – when it fell to her to break up the house, reduce
familiar rooms to a last order, a world
boxed and sealed. And while I know she would, she cannot keep me from the house emptied but for the pale ovals and rectangles
still nailed fast–cleaved to the walls where mirrors, portraits had hung–persistent, sourceless shadows.
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