Bittersweet Comfort

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.

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