Letting Go and Saying Good-bye

“As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.”

(Psalm 103:15-16)

 

On September 29^th of 2022, this house situated as 5184 William Street in Pierrefonds, Quebec, left our family’s possession. 62 years earlier in April 1960, my parents moved into this newly constructed house.

 

My parents have been gone for a few years now, Dad was taken in December 2013 and Mom followed in March 2016, and as those Bible verses rightly tell us, this place remembers them no more, nor does it remember my sister, brothers and me.

In the final weeks leading up to the closing date of the sale, Alan recorded a few images. Without my parents present as well as absent their possessions, in the end a house remains just a house.

After stepping inside the front door...

Summer 2022... and the living room is devoid of furnishings except for this temporary plastic chair.

In an earlier time and in an earlier century, Ted was seated in this same corner.
Back then, Mom's knick-nacks and always present ivy adorned the divider.

Kimberly & David on Christmas Day 1983 in Grandma's & Grandpa's living room

The dining room in summer 2022... quite the contrast from Kimberly and David playing here on the living room floor in the foreground.

The dining room was empty when we first moved into this house back in 1960. A year later a carpet appeared (similar to the one shown), something which came from Dad's Aunt Annie's home Scotstown after she passed away in 1961.

Mom moved her folding card table and accompanying folding chairs in here, where they remained until Dad and Mom were able to purchase their Vilas-made solid maple dinging room set. I recall sitting in here at that wobbly card table, doing my Grade 3 homework. I'm not sure which I disliked more; the homework or the wobbly table.

Same dining room, but quite a few years earlier...

Christmas dinner 1965.

Dad is seated at the head of the table, but as this image reveals, he hadn't yet built those shelves and cabinets around the window. Ted is on the right wearing glasses and on his left Alan is next to him. Kathy is across the table and seated next to our paternal grandmother.

Moving right along...

The kitchen in 2022

Mom in the kitchen where she spent many an hour... and she always knew what to prepare for dinner. 

Shucked corn (ready on the counter) was waiting to go in the dutch oven. No date was recorded on this picture, so I'm guessing this scene was recorded in the early 1980's, when, as newlyweds, Kie and I would visit my parents on most weekends.

I'm grateful to Mom for teaching what she knew to Kie, and today I'm all the more grateful to Kie for having learned Mom's recipes and using them these many decades later.

Christmas Day in the late 1980's saw Mom and Dad in the kitchen having just stuffed the turkey and readying it for roasting. 

Christmas dinner was a yearly and much anticipated family event until Mom was unable to do this, having been afflicted by the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Kitchen scene circa 1995

Kimberly & David playing cards with Grandma (and their Dad)... in the kitchen.

And now down into the basement...

Summer 2022 and an empty playroom in the basement.

Dad began finishing parts of the basement after Alan was born, and he started first with what would become my bedroom. Afterward, he started with the playroom. These many decades later I can boast that I helped Dad in those evenings by nailing together some of the framing.

I can't tell you how many hours Ted and I spent down here in the playroom playing pool and ping pong between the mid 1960's and the early 1970's, and I can't tell you how many friends during that time visited and joined us down here too, but I can tell you those days and hours were many.

Summer 2022.

Dad's work bench (built in 1960) had already been disassembled and removed when the basement was being emptied in preparation for the sale of the house.

I wish someone had taken a picture of Dad working at his bench in the basement.

I think people tend to confuse home and house and use the terms interchangeably, but as passing years that soon become passing decades shall in time reveal, a house is just a building and only the people who dwelt within the structure created the home. 

Remove by time and life circumstances, and then the eventual deaths of those loved ones, that remaining empty structure called a house becomes nothing more than an empty shell capable only of evoking many memories.

The Oddblock Station Agent