The funeral of our house… or as the ACE calls it, the debris removal. No more accidentally catching a glimpse of a colander, or film cartridges, of broken coffee cups. No more considering whether I could lift the sunken piece of roof to search for our wedding bands because I know exactly where they are: under the roof, under the ceiling, under the now doughy mixture of drywall, under the ash of the closet, under the burned and disappeared boxes of notes, papers, odds and ends, under the shelf where I kept the nail polish and hair pins, on top of the ashes of photo paper and enlarger filters. No more though. Now our wedding bands, hopefully stuck together and melted into each other, are on the back of one of the 18 trucks carrying our past. Supposedly our future will come in at the back of some other trucks, eventually. But first will come the loss of our jacaranda who was there since 1947.
Hopefully the pods of seeds I collected will have the life force in them to push through. Otherwise I’ll add one more Ball jar to my collection of pickled emotions. This one will be labeled “loss of our jacaranda” and I’ll put it next to the others with labels “the loneliness of the evacuation night”, “my mom’s earrings”, “our photos”,
“His paintings”, “friends disappeared.” There will come a time to open the jars and digest however intensely fermented they may be.
The house as a building may be no more (I could write a whole volume to add to Bachelard’s), but the idea is still there. The ACE crews being our guests, we shared coffee and donuts. Isn’t that what a house is, what a house is for?
Giraffe in White 