Living on

My home goes with me wherever I go. I've lived everywhere and nowhere. Thirteen different places in my adult life not counting cars slept in and couches crashed on. I have moved some things every time, the number of boxes growing with each move other than the times I could get everything in the trunk of the car because someone wanted all the rest. Maybe wanted isn't the right word. More like decided to take it.

Some of this stuff covers well over a hundred years of my roots. On both sides of my family, it has ended up with me, not by design but by attrition. Some of it is stuff that someone else moved from home to home many years ago. People long gone. At what point does someone in charge of dealing with history like this shrug their shoulders while browsing through photographs and greeting and report cards and baby shoes and items only worth the grasp and hold of sentiment and puzzle over who is this and who's was this and set a century of not forgotten, you can't forget what you don't know, but the last vestige of someone's existence out at the curb like the empty food cartoons of yesterday's trash.

Being the keeper of the torch is both an honor and a burden. Someone has to let go sometime. Yesterday, first box in hand I took a halting step, then stopped. Not now, not yet. If I tell the story and pass the torch they can live another half century. All of them.

I feel like I owe it to those gone, those who have just arrived and those yet to come.