Moving Day

Tomorrow, I'll be bringing Rachael to Kentucky where she will be living for the next nine months or so. Rachael was born in march of 1989 and we moved into our house the following September. We bought our house from an elderly couple whose daughter had convinced them to move closer to her in Florida. I know the couple had owned the house for quite some time. How long though, I'm not quite sure. I don't know, for instance, whether their daughter had grown up in this house or if they had moved in when she was a young girl. Did she walk to the local schools from here? I'm sure some amount of Christmases and birthdays were celebrated here, that is assuming they celebrated those kinds of things. I don't know how attached they were to the place and I don't know how hard it was for them to leave. For some people, a house is just a house.

When you come in the back door of our house, you immediately come into an enclosed back porch. For many years, this porch functioned as a playroom for our tiny kids. Now, it's a combination pantry and storage room, where the overflow of food and junk and memories are stacked in heaps and piles, leaving only a narrow path leading from the back door to the doorway of the kitchen.

As you stand in the door to the kitchen, you can look straight ahead, through the kitchen, into our front entry. To the immediate left off the kitchen is a doorway to the dining room. Further ahead, off the left of the front entry, is a doorway to the living room. The dining room and living room are open to each other, so the effect is one big loop around our tiny first floor. No matter where you are on the first floor, you can pretty much hear everything. Everything is open. Everything is connected.

Anyway, years ago, when the girls were toddlers, when I would get home from work, the back porch door would swing open as I pulled into the driveway. As I got out of the car, the two girls would be there, all smiles. Helaina would be squealing, sometimes clapping along, "Daddy's home! Daddy's home!" Behind her, Rachael, barely able to walk, would be doing her best to try and jump up and down- her knees would bounce and her head would throw back, but her feet never left the ground.

When they were even younger, I would make it all the way inside to the back door of the kitchen. From out of sight, coming from the loop through the living room, I would hear a klump...shump...... klump....shump. This was the sound Rachael made as she crawled along the loop on the hardwood floor. One of Rachael's legs was a little weaker than the other and it tended to drag a little as she made her way along.

When I would open the kitchen door, I would hear the klump...shump.....   klump...shump, coming from the other room. Seconds later, Rachael's head would appear in the distance, at the living room entry doorway- inches from the floor and all cheeks. As she stopped for a second and turned to see me, her face would explode in a big umbrella smile and her head would go down like a charging bull as she made a beeline for me- KlumpShumpKlumpShumpKlumpShump. I would whisk her up and kiss her on her cheek, carrying this tiny doll as I gave her sister a hug.

Sometimes I still stop at the kitchen doorway and I still hear, or at least, feel those sounds from long ago. And I've often wondered what it was like for the previous owner when he left this house for the last time.

Did he stop and take one last look through this doorway, into a house filled with boxes- or worse, into a house that was now empty? Did he take a second or two and look back, and listen to any memories that still echoed in the walls? Was it hard for him to say goodbye, or was this house just a house?