Monday, June 21, 2010

An Interesting Father's Day

I was never very close to my Dad's parents. It feels more natural to call them my dad's parents than to call them my grandparents. All my life they lived 15 minutes away but I only saw them a couple of times a year at best. Now it's been years since they both passed away. Through stories from my dad I've come to know them better and love them for doing their best in life.

After both of them were gone, their house was sold along with the 2-ish acres it sat on. Because of such-and-such a city ordinance, the land had to be sold in pieces to be developed with cookie-cutter houses. The woods would be cut down and the house destroyed. After the downturn in the housing market, the plans were never carried out. The woods and the house went untouched.

Yesterday, I went for a drive with my dad. He asked me if we could go by the old house. As we came up over the hill. it was a shocking sight. I hadn't been there in years and didn't know that all around their property, what used to be woods, was a new subdivision. But the most shocking of all was that the house was destroyed. Bull-dozed. Demolished. Only part of the foundation was there, along with a pile of bricks and the skeleton of the fireplace. I stood in what used to be the family room and thought about my childhood memories of the place. Even though my grandparents hadn't always shown it, I knew they loved me.

I stayed in the car as my dad got out to pick up a few bricks to bring home. I watched him as he sifted through the wreckage of the house he had lived in during all his growing up years. His dad had built the house and no one else had ever lived in it. I started to cry as I watched him slowly pacing around the rubbish piles, trying to decide which bricks to take.

How do you choose which brick to take? How do you choose what to take and what to leave behind?

I stared at the tree that used to have a swing. I stared at where the dog used to be tied up, the dog that absolutely terrified me. Change is a strange thing. To see everything so drastically different was shocking. Life is constantly changing. I want to live life to the fullest. A log of times people look forward to "when I'm finally done with school" or "when I'm finally married" or "when I'm finally retired." If we live with this mindset we miss all the todays in which we could have been perfectly content with just a little change of attitude. We miss all the todays that we can never get back. I want to love my life TODAY because I'll never have another day exactly like it.

Today I'm grateful for the piece of brick that I chose to take home from my grandparent's house and the leaf I taped into my journal from a plant my grandmother planted. 

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