Something from the Undercurrents
Empty spaces. 

Just a year and a half ago, I wrote about my chance encounter with photos of my Grandma's house in a church hallway 120 miles away. A Panama City youth group had gone to Century to clean up Hurricane Ivan debris and had paused for a lunch on the front porch of her old house, which was by that time empty and had been purchased by a church that now met in the former Century High School building next door. 

I wrote of how this crowd of people caring for a stranger's house had touched me, how I had never anticipated seeing the house under those circumstances, how I'd expected the house to end up being bulldozed rather than put to use again. 

I wrote of missing the front porch and flowery yard I saw in those pictures, childhood days of play and work among the azaleas, and the woman who had lived there, ``who always had been an old woman'' in my memory. 

Now, like her, even the old house and its grounds are only memories. 

All of it is gone. The house, the azaleas, the fence, and whatever trees had survived the hurricanes (except for a few pines on the back of the property). Her fountains and pools, which she had built with her own hands using concrete and bricks and stones she had gathered on summer vacations. 

The walkway she'd poured around the backyard fountain. 

The hopscotch court she'd drawn in wet concrete in the midst of her flower garden so that it would survive forever - or at least for the use of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Crushed, now. Destroyed. 

Even the grass. They had tilled the earth and dragged it and flattened it. It was a brown scar. 

Last weekend, I walked the empty lot where Grandma's house had stood between the high school and elementary off Hecker Road. It seemed so small now. How could a house and sheds and gigantic azaleas - all of it - how had so many memories fit in so small an empty space? 

In the midst of the lot, my wife kneeled and discovered a tiny square of tan tile peeking from under brown earth. Grandma had used these inch-square pieces in her bathroom. 

Then she found an old asthma spray cartridge, a symbol of the woman's lingering infirmity recalling memories of her drawing on those things, desperate for a breath. 

We sat in the van and considered the past, the traces of it in our fingers, and a breathless aching in an empty, Grandma-shaped space inside. 

Peace. 


(This originally appeared on the sunday lifestyle front, April 16, 2006, at The News Herald)

And this is how my father responded to it in his semi-weekly column for The Tri-City Ledger. Comment and tell me what you think of his reaction or my original emo statement.