Endings

I think I was in my house for the last time yesterday. I didn't even realize it. I had a meeting to get to, so S and I loaded the car for the second time that morning and rushed off. He went back for a third load, and that was it.

I'm talking about the house I grew up in, the one my dad just sold. We moved there when I was two, just before my sister was born. I left when I went to college, came back for the summer after my freshman year, and haven't lived there since. My mom left at the end of that summer too, and my sister two years later. My dad didn't live there either for much of the 80s and 90s, but my grandmother was there until she died, and occasionally my cousins or my aunt or uncle would stay for a while. The house has three apartments, and sometimes they all were rented, but often we kept one for whoever needed it. Eventually my dad moved back.

The thing is, the house was always there. For the last 39 years. And now it won't be.

When we were packing the car with the second load, R walked by with her new baby. R grew up down the street. She was a year younger than my sister, her middle brother was a year older than me, and her oldest brother was...older. They went to our school and our synagogue, and sometimes we played with them and sometimes we didn't. It wasn't a super-neighborhoody, hang-out-on-the-street-with-all-the-kids kind of neighborhood (for one thing, there were apartments at the end of the street), but a bunch of the families knew each other, well, forever.

R now lives in the house she grew up in with her partner and two kids. Her mom died and her dad moved and now he is getting married again. I walked her home and went in for a moment and held the baby, but I had to get to my meeting, so we exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together. I think maybe we will. E played with her older daughter once last fall and they had a good time, and I'd like to catch up.

When we first decided to move back to East Coast Big City, we thought we would live in my house, but it didn't turn out that way, which is for the best.

I don't know what I would have done if I'd realized it was the last time. The house is pretty empty, and all the stuff that matters to me is gone, much of it to my attic. My room hasn't been my room for almost 20 years. I suppose I could have gotten sentimental, but it probably would have been because I felt I should.

My dad forwarded me an email this morning from his cousin's daughter saying that her dad's cancer is terminal. That cousin became a genealogy fiend several years ago and has written a book about our family that traces us back to the Baal Shem Tov, of course (just as all English families go back to royalty, all Jewish families go back to the Baal Shem Tov, or at least Maimonides). Every few months he sends out a newsletter full of pictures and family news. I sent him a note with our holiday card and he put us in the last newsletter and got everything wrong--kids' names, their activities, S's job.

I wonder if his wife will continue the newsletter. Somehow I doubt it.