On Friday I was absent from autopsy and I traveled to the town where my parents have lived for twenty years to be there for my mother. She retired from the Department of Social Services, a veteran of many, many years of government services. She did a stint in child protective services, years in medicaid, a stretch in adult protective services that included working from home for hours each night in addition to the full days put in at the office, and ended as a worker in AFDC. I can't think of a time in recent memory where we have gone out in the town near her home where we didn't run into someone she'd helped on their way to a better life.
On her first day of retirement she wanted to close out her career with a party for all of the people she'd worked with over the years. She invited other retirees, long time coworkers, and her best friends to join her for a night of music and food. It was a lovely party, well attended and extremely well provisioned (it is cultural!). My sister flew in from Tennessee, my husband drove up from Columbia, and I brought the rest of the family down from North Carolina.
My parents have their house up for sale (and our first house is also up for sale, if anyone wants to move to upstate SC and would like a house or two!). My mother will take a few weeks off to visit a family friend in a pleasant location and then start splitting her time between North and South Carolina until the house sells. And then my parents will officially be homeless (except for a third house that they own in another town in upstate SC) and living with me and the kids.
I dropped my sister off at the airport on Sunday morning and I realized at that moment that it was the last time that we would all be together in their home. I should feel more nostalgic about it, but the house has been renovated enough since the last time I lived there that it doesn't feel familiar. It makes it so much easier to move somewhere else.
It's hard to leave your childhood home, but I've found that, as with most things, having photos of the house and the happy times there is sufficient.
ReplyDeleteSeveral years ago, the people who owned my first childhood home (that we moved out of when I was 9)let us walk through it. It was great to see what they had done with it. It almost didn't even feel like the place I had lived.