Last Night

Last Night

    It was a bit of an eerie feeling, my brother in the other bedroom, as exhausted as I was.  It was now past 10 at night and we both continued talking despite our alarms set to wake us in just over 5 hours.  He faced a long 6-hour flight home, while I faced about a 12-hour drive (in my behemoth rental car).  Still, our bodies would not sleep and our voices carried across the hallway.  At first, I thought it was simply being overtired, a point where your body tells you that you need to get some rest but your mind's chatter just won't shut off.  But as my brother and I kept talking, we both realized that it was something more, that this was to be our last night in this house.

    The house had been a good one, my parents keeping the lawn spectacularly green and trimmed.  We (my brother and I) both remembered being impressed, their lawn often appearing as something out of a fertilizer ad, the garden lush with tomatoes and melons and grapes, their plums and such often in full bloom and full of bird holes as the birds sampled only the juiciest fruits from the bounty we had no chance of reaching.  And the lemons, so sweet as to almost not be lemons.  That lawn and garden was a nurturing sight that put our meager efforts to shame, a true harvesting and display of the best this once-volcanic soil could produce year after year.  It was little wonder that so much agriculture occurred in this part of the country...and here it was our last night.

    This wasn't our home, not by any means.  But our parents had been here for much of their lives (about 40 years for my mother) and certainly my brother and I had visited them here enough times to form some deep memories.  Round table discussions that brought out hard-won emotions, most of which we'd never seen and would, for the most part, never see again.  It's the old story of never hearing your father say, "I love you," but knowing that he did; this was our story, even if it seemed to fall more into the category of tough love.  And as we discovered on clearing his remaining tools and saved fuses and switches (many had disappeared over the years, objects swapped or stolen by workers according to my mother; at first we discounted her version of things, even as we recognized the existence of people who prey on seniors...but now, seeing what remained of my dad's tools and knowing what used to exist, it was easier to accept her account of things), he was quite the master of fixing and building things, his overhanging back porch still strong and meeting the approval of the realtor (grandfathered in by the inspector), the comments from others repeatedly saying, "Your dad built this well" or "he built this the right way."

    On my mother's side, we could almost watch the progression of her age by the garden and lawn outside, each item dropping off as the spraying and trimming and weeding simply got to be too much, the bountiful harvest no longer needed for just one person who no longer ate as much and the weight of the fruit and vegetables now too heavy to even carry and give away.  It was as if heartbreak had slowly crept in to take over, robbing her of her simple pleasures while allowing only the necessary ones, wiping the car down (she still drove, having passed her written and driving exams at age 90), doing the laundry and hanging the clothes, the latter of which toppled her and caused her fracture.  Her final indignity had occurred and now she was out.  The house was left to return to the land.

    Outside, my brother and I dealt with broken mowers and a weed-filled base at the yellowing-leaved lemon tree (needs spraying, someone told me).  While birds' chirping filled the morning air, mosquitos arrived in force at night.  It was as if one side wanted us out and one side wanted us in.  Either way, that last night was the night to bring closure and it was an odd feeling.  Thoughts and memories that we thought we had far too much time for during our stay, were now being compressed into just a few minutes, our tired bodies again trying to make us let go and move forward but our minds clinging on for just a few more seconds.  This would be it.  In the morning, we would enter panic mode and do the final cleanout of last-minute food (we had saved some food for breakfast but as usual, it was way too early to eat so much of it was tossed) and the making sure the heat was off and the doors were locked.  We were rushed, the clock was ticking, a deja-vu of things we all knew would happen as we tried to sleep that night.  This would be it; we should simply reminisce and savor the final night sleeping in the house that we had also watched age.  Like us, the photos showed the changing colors and the changing landscape as stray cats came and went and my father came and went and now my mother came and went.  The house had outlasted all of us.

    Our story was a familiar one, for there have been many books written on leaving a farm or memoirs of leaving a childhood home.  Authors had grown up there, lived there with their parents.  But for my brother and I, somehow this house meant more than the childhood home where that had happened, the one we had left when school ended and we began to venture out into the world.  This house now represented a different period in our lives, an almost more mature period.  This was the home for our parents and we were simply visitors being allowed in, privileged visitors but visitors nonetheless.  And we had now stripped it clean, returned it to it's former state or what we thought was its former state when our parents bought it.  And now, the realtor told us of new families coming to look at it and viewing it with fresh eyes, babies on the way and dogs ready to pounce on the large back lawn, the lemons ready to be rescued and returned to a state of health.  Perhaps this was as it should be, that it was simply time.  All of us, from my parents to my brother and I, had had memories of all sorts from being sheltered here.  We had met neighbors around there and watched orchards and stores come and go, and time had simply come knocking on our door with an eviction notice but a nice eviction notice, one that simply read that it was time to let others know and enjoy what we had seen.  Perhaps it was all as it should be, and all on this last night.  A good night.  And with that, we slept.