Reflections of Home

 My eldest son Thomas wrote this story after I put his childhood home on the market while downsizing into my new life as a widow. 

Thomas’ Essay

There’s a 'FOR SALE' sign just steps away from where my dad fingered our family surname in the wet concrete below the curb when it was poured three decades ago. Burnished by hurricanes Fran and Floyd, two feet of snow in Y2K and thirty years of seasons, the letters once etched deep are now well-worn hieroglyphs, faded like the memories made in my boyhood home.
Its occupants, once five, vacated in a slow but natural forward march until only the matriarch came to hold the fort. Her three boys became men, fledged and left her an empty nester before cancer left her a widow. Alone with her thoughts in a place once so full of life, the stark emptiness only served to amplify her losses. A home without family turns back to a house, the studs a skeleton of what once was.
But despite its hollowness, the house does have solid bones - besides the metatarsal (mine) and ulna (my brother’s) fractured sometime in the early 2000s. Perched atop a slope, the steep driveway will likely frighten potential buyers who simply lack imagination and vision. If they were to ask, I would tell them that the driveway is the ideal runway for crude wooden ramps hobbled together by small hands from scrap plywood, two-by-fours and remnant bricks. And that not too long-ago wheels, in pairs of twos and fours, rolled from the top of the incline, their riders descending with the reckless abandon and ignorance afforded only by youthful naivety. Speed led to blood, scabs and scars in a time well before helmets and pads softened our spirit.
Once concealed by towering evergreen trees that finally succumbed to disease, the train track that borders the property’s rear is sure to be another red flag to interested parties. However, had they only experienced the thrill – half fear, half frenzy – of running down and stealing the red safety flag that once flew from the caboose of the slow-moving CSX freight train on its daily run like a western outlaw maybe they would think different. Or had they placed a penny on the flat rail and cheered as the locomotive pancaked the soft zinc coated copper into collectable oval trinkets. Or if they would have learned to decipher curse words from the vivid graffiti on the rail cars or convinced the conductor to sound the horn simply by motioning their right arm… then, maybe they would realize they were on the right side of the tracks.
The house, like the flawed family that lived in it for so many years, is not perfect. The new owners will find the need to update and upgrade cosmetic or otherwise. While doing so they will surely stumble upon my father’s signature and a date written carefully on the nearest piece of drywall, stud or flat surface; the hidden graphite autograph a time capsule to the bygone days I now cherish. It is my hope the new owners will appreciate the pride my father took in maintaining his home; blood, sweat and tears – the home has them all and all for different reasons.
It is my hope that the new owners of my childhood home will see it for what it is, what our family made it. A place for discovery, growth and maturity. A safe haven for imagination and make-believe. A shelter with a foundation strong enough to withstand the storms of hurricanes, three adolescent boys and the stresses of life and death. Mostly, I hope when the new owners get their mail, they’ll notice the faint lettering in the concrete just beneath the box and remember the folk that left the roots of their family tree tangled amidst the front yard’s towering oaks, buried deep in the red Carolina clay.
written by:  Thomas Harvey 

9/14/2021