Homesick By Ann Marie Woolsey-Johnson
In the garage, Ave Maria is playing on the old, tiny boom box. (One of the satellite stations they always played in the house, I think.) It’s odd that I’ve never heard this song on this station until today. Odder still that it’s playing on this radio… The radio from the first house. Yard sale items lay haphazardly across vintage hutches and a card table that belonged to my grandfather. Bric-a-brac everywhere… Still, they’re the kind of things that pull at your heart because you know they are the last of what’s left. Ceramic mugs, periodicals from the 70s, a brand new crock pot, my old skis and a dollhouse, a Japanese painting that I didn’t recognize and then remembered it lived inside, next to the front door, right there in plain
view all these 22 years. It came with this house.
And this music. Ave Maria was their wedding song. How strange that she doesn’t remark, as she leafs through some of the bags, setting aside a few clothing items. “These we’ll donate.” She says, “No one wants to buy used underwear at a yard sale.”
No one knows how bad the pain is.
People stop by; they say hello. My mother introduces us, tells someone; “Yes, we moved two weeks ago,” and I don’t make eye contact, not with one single person. I pretend to organize things, but I’m really just touching, grasping… trying to make contact with some of my history through pieces of my DNA left on surfaces… it’s bound to be there.
My sister visited our first home -- our childhood home -- the other day, Mother’s Day.
HVWP COMMONPLACE 49
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