Time Spent Thinking

I wondered if things hadn't changed for the worse, if their health hadn't failed them, and my grandparents were still around, what they would be doing. How they would be living their lives at any given moment. Grandma dozing in the rocker, arms folded on her lap over a half croqueted blanket. Pop Pop at his workbench in the basement, grabbing duct tape to tape up the draft coming in under the air conditioner, or fixing the folding mechanism on the big umbrella for the outside table.

I wondered if at some point in the future, some other grandson would look upon the house with the same reverence and nostalgic longing as I did now, if I was just one part of a much broader picture. Now, though, I was left behind, left behind as someone that had a hope of saving the house, at an age where buying the house was just out of reach. Sometimes watching a disaster (the kind of natural disasters Pop Pop would watch on the Discovery Channel) is worse than actually being involved it in. Being removed from the destruction, observing from a safe distance allows time to take in all the details, compute the magnitude and ramifications of such a powerful force. To watch people disappear under giant waves or getting ripped from their homes and tossed into the churning furry of a tornado.

I watched my little brothers stare around at the empty house, wondering what it would be like never to set foot in there again. Wondering with me if life really was this unfair. It gave me time to think about what it meant to the family, to lose the very thing my great grandparents had come to America for, to lose the house I grew up in, the house Pop Pop and I kept up in the short few years we had together.