Write Off #4: The Circle of Life

This piece is part of a creative writing challenge “The Cindafuckingrella Write Off” with the theme: “Life”

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By Cindafuckingrella

I hesitantly got out of the car. Two men were tearing down the garage. They told me if I wanted a last look I had to do it now, as they were demolishing the house.

As I walked up the garden path, where I have walked a million times, I remembered my mom standing by the door scouting for me with anticipation; I remember yelling, “I got an A” after a big exam; her rushing towards me.

Apart from the stale loneliness that always lingers in an empty house, it looked like itself. I choked up as I walked through one room after another, flooded with memories of the life that once unfolded within these walls. My youth.

On light summer nights we’d take a midnight swim in the Fjord. The murmur of voices, sitting on the deck wearing blankets, gazing for shooting stars.

One evening, we sat upstairs, overlooking the water where a major thunderstorm was playing out. We were safe and warm and drank coffee with whiskey, brown sugar and cream in it. He was right there next to me and I was in love and didn’t know whether it was the nearness of him or the thunderstorm that generated all this electricity in the air.

Oh, that garden. It was beautiful. Huge. It had soul.

The entire family gathered here – exhausted – one May morning after my Grandmother had died. In this garden, we had my graduation party and my wedding reception; right there, we cut the cake and up there my dad gave a speech.

My mom spent thousand of hours in that garden; digging, raking, cutting, pulling. All that grooming. She took her morning coffee walking around in her bathrobe; inspecting the beds, nipping off a bud here and yanking out a weed there.

Today it was sadly and grotesquely overgrown. Chaotic.

As I was leaving, the new owners happened to arrive. I told them I used to live there and the guy  – apologetically – showed me the drawings of the new house. I couldn’t see out my eyes. Two little red-headed girls ran around in the jungle.

There is a painful beauty to knowing that they will now spend their lives here, on this spot on earth.

Life.

It continues without us.