The other side

Rich is celebrating the fact that there are less than three weeks to go until the move is complete and Mom and Dad are settled in their new home. He goes to the farm every few days for stuff and just to hang for a bit. It's no big deal.

I, on the other hand, am dealing with a lot of junk right now. I can't--not WON'T, but can't and therefore, I won't--set foot on the land. In spite of going to Valerie and Tony's on several occasions since the sale of the farm, I won't even pass it. (Thank goodness there are at least two ways to get to the Trapps' from here.) I can't. I'm not that strong; after all, this is the only home I've known for all of my forty-two years.

Joanne Beyersdoerfer said it best: it's like a death. I thought I was nuts until she said it. Knowing Joanne, even then I still wasn't sure. ;-) But then someone else said the same thing last Sunday, so either all three of us are cases or there is a lot of truth in that. I tend to believe the latter. I feel a grief in my heart like nothing I've ever had except when I've lost those I loved the most--my grandparents, my mother-in-law, Brian's grandparents, my cousin...It's an emptiness that will, in time, become a part of me that I will accept, but that's all it will be--an acceptance. Nothing will replace. Nothing will compare. It's a loss that is almost too great to bear, nearly like the others. The house and the land aren't human, but they're so much a part of me that they may as well be. Like they said about Jacob in Skylark--the movie that I watched last night--my name is written in the land there. And it's not eraseable. Regardless of who owns it or what he does with it, what I've known all my life will be in my heart until my life is over. And I wonder if it's so much a part of me that Jesus will make a house with dark wood-panel halls that lead to a freezing (or roasting, depending on the season) bathroom and an upstairs that allows the sounds of the tree limbs banging on the tin on windy days and the drumming of the rain on those spring and summer nights. (I know there isn't darkness in Heaven, but I wonder if we really need darkness to have "night." I can't imagine a life without an opportunity to be lulled to sleep under such a sound at least once in a while.) I imagine my mansion with floors that bounce as you walk through and an upstairs that has a register in the floor that are perfect for calling upstairs for dinner--or downstairs to ask a silly question. I imagine smelling Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving dinners--and others--with the women talking in the cramped kitchen while the men and the kids sit in the crowded living room. I imagine open fields and woods to walk through and cows grazing on the ridges. And I imagine spectacular sunsets blending in their yellows and purples and reds and grays just over the ridge.

Needless to say, I can barely read the screen right now. I've needed this for about two months and I'm finally getting it. The house is quiet and no one is here to interrupt me while I grieve. And I do grieve. I grieve that I couldn't have it and I grieve that someone with, I believe, no regard all but stole it from us and I grieve that someone else was so ready to "get rid of it" that he allowed that to happen.

I'm going to be in Louisville and then possibly Belleview on March 11. I can't bear to be at the farm with the family on that day, as sacrilegious and selfish as that seems. But I've never been good with good-byes.

Especially the final ones.