Mom and Dad had been gone for over a year. They passed away
within a year of each other. It took us almost that long to clean out their
house, our childhood home, to prepare it for sale.
It was a bittersweet chore, and
sometimes felt more like a journey back to who our parents were in their younger
years, like finding tucked in the bottom of a shoe box of old paperwork
intimate notes of love my dad wrote to mom. Dad liked to write letters as much
as receive them in the mail and he saved quite few letters. Mom was a collector
of ‘stuff’, things of personal importance, like the pink or blue beaded ID bracelets
hospital nurseries used to put on newborn babies. Cleaning out their stuff wasn’t the real
chore, although my mom was not inclined to throw out much of anything, not so
much as a hoarder, but more a holdover of a post-depression mentality of “put
that away, save it, I might need that later on.”
When we finally cleared out the house to mostly just bare
walls it was time to freshen up the house to put it on the market and hopefully
sell it quickly.
While still mourning the loss of our Mom and Dad and with our
busy lives of raising our own families we dreaded the weekends of making time
to work on this house for someone else to live in and make it a home of their
own. This particular Saturday was one of those days. I was in the throes of
helping my daughter coordinate therapies for her infant son with special needs,
my sister had three small sons, ages three to six years and my brother had five
girls ages five to twenty. We were all very busy with the stuff of our own
lives and families.
Our house was a three story Victorian. We were weighted down
with painting materials as we entered through the vestibule into the parlor.
Although the house was totally empty for months there was an unmistakable scent
in the air that should not have been there because the house was vacant.
At first no one said anything about it. We dropped the
materials of our job at hand and just stood there in the room, until my brother
said, “is anybody going to say anything or am I the only one that smells that?”
My sister and I looked at each other and smiled.
It was my mother’s favorite perfume, Anais, Anais. Mom loved
her perfumes and after spritzing herself she would spray the air with a quick
wafting spray and say, “just to freshen the air”.
Was Mom sending us a message? She was indeed. A house is a home
until it’s not. It was time to freshen it up for someone else to make it their
home. Message received. Thanks, Mom.
.
