Still Here

"Nothin' much left. Nothin' much at all. Shame really." Durgin Jamison stood, rocking back and forth on the heels of his well worn work-boots, hands slipped inside the back pockets of his bib overalls, and gnawing on the pipe that was a permanent fixture between his teeth. I pushed past him and ran.

Mom grabbed me when I came running up, turning me away from home and buried my head in her neck--as much from her need to hold on to something as to delay, even for a moment, my reaction. I felt a hand squeeze my shoulder, hard, and knew Dad had come up to enfold us both. I could feel his hand shaking as he gripped and knew it stemmed from that place deep inside where he shoved emotions regarding things beyond his control. He rather preferred to be in control, in his no nonsense, capable sort of way and any time that was preempted, he always felt a little off kilter. He was balanced and would never show the world that he was shaking inside.

I felt Mom's arms loosen and turned. No, there was nothin' much left at all. Around me I heard voices, loose, odd words that never quite added up to coherent sentences, but were readily understood by all, none-the-less.

There were no words, adequate or otherwise, for this---

The house, our home, was utterly, completely, as if it had never been there--gone. Not simply destroyed: no twisted beams or flattened walls collapsed against each other, no fluttering bits of clothing hung from canted windows or shards of glass were impaled into concrete—there was nothing but a hole where the Michigan basement once held the furnace and hot water heater beneath six inch hand-hewn oaken beams. It was completely empty. There was not a piece of paper, an odd screw or broken dish to be found. Fifty yards away, the barn still stood in all its weathered glory as if there’d been a solid, impenetrable wall between it and the house.

Mom, kneeling half in and half out of a muddy puddle, a dazed look mocking normally unflappable features was softly saying over and over and over, “Everybody’s okay. Everybody’s okay. Everybody’s okay.” Like a mantra, it echoes, but sounds like it might underwater.

Dad’s off to the west side of where the house used to be, standing where he should be in the middle of his workshop. He’s already processed that we are looking at the impossible. He’s beyond the insurance issues: stuff is replaceable. But I know he’s thinking about the inconsequential things that hurt, but can be rebuilt, refinished, or re-imagined. He needs to focus on those things. The rest is too enormous. The floor to ceiling bookcases that surrounded the fireplace in the living room that he and Grand-dad built from trees harvested off the back forty. The rocking horse he’d just finished putting the final touches on for my grand-daughter as a Christmas present, even though Christmas was three seasons away. The rocking chair he’d made for Mom.

“I can’t believe it is gone. As if it vanished, like it never even existed.” Dad talking now to our nearest neighbor, Durgin.

“Everybody’s okay,” Mom picked up the mantra refrain. I’ve never seen my mother look this helpless, this fragile.

I’ve yet to say a word. What can I say? What is there to say? Like a wiped slate, a hundred years of home erased.

“Won’t have to pay for clean-up like them folks down crossed the creek,” Durgin offers. “That’ll be sumptin’,” he adds around the stem of his pipe.

Really? My head whips up, but Dad just lays a hand on my shoulder and pulls me in for a hug. “We’ll be okay. We weren't hurt. We’ll be fine.”

“Everybody’s okay.” Mom seems stuck on the thought.

Odd, disjointed memories flutter down around me like the first December snowfall. Soft, gentle flakes of remembered smiles. Mom always complaining that there just wasn’t that ‘perfect’ place for a Christmas tree as every year she tried a different spot. My hide-y hole halfway up the back stairs where I hid all my secrets, wrote in my journal and hid at chore time.

I see something fluttering down from an impossibly blue, now cloudless sky. It wafts, slipping side to side, rocking, and then spirals gently to the ground at my feet. Bending over, I pick up a glossy sheet of paper; it is the collage I’d made for the photo album of me, my daughter and Mom, as children. I see my dad holding my hands as I take my first step. My hand as my daughter takes hers. Grand-dad with Mom.

Now I start to cry as I hold it out to her. She clasps it to her chest as if daring some gust of wind to rip it away again.

I can’t remember the last time we’d all sat together to go through the albums like we did when I was little. Sure, we have them all online now somewhere, but wasn’t the point.

“Everybody IS okay, Mom,” I said smiling. “We are all okay.”

“We can rebuild,” comforts Dad. “Just think, Gini, you’d be able to design exactly where the tree’ll go!”

“And it will always be home,” I add. “We make it that way.”

“First thing I’ll build in my new workshop will be a frame for this picture,” announces Dad. "It’s going right over our new fireplace.”

“Next to the kitchen that will finally have enough cabinet space,” smiles Mom, looking much more like Mom than earlier.

“Dad, we must still have the hide-y hole halfway up the stairs too,” I chime in. “Every great-granddaughter needs her own secret space.”



"Nothin' much left. Nothin' much at all,” Durgin repeats, scoffing a toe through a clump of grass.

“You’re wrong, Durgin,” I say before walking away. “It’s all still here. You just can’t see it.”


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