The holidays are hard, thanksgiving was daniels favorite and of course the approaching of it has hit like a ton of bricks.
If I move away and year’s later I come back to visit this little country town we once called home, a place that hold’s so many memories, memories that will have happened so long ago that now the place and time are littered with cobwebs. Those memories that were part of my past that I cherished as a younger version of myself, having laid dormant in my mind for many years at that point. These old roads bringing them back to life for me. All that will be left of them by then will be the warm recollections of an older version of myself, who has finally come home.
As I’m passing through I wonder, will I still ache for him? When I look out my window as I drive by these familiar hillside’s and road’s we’ve been on countless time’s, window’s down, screaming out our favorite Tom Petty song’s. Will the memories come crashing like flood water’s? Will I alway’s wish I could go back to a time where he was here and everything made sense? No matter where life take’s me, when a warm summer breeze brushes my cheeks, will that longing for him come rushing back? Will it ever even go away in the first place? As I stand before the ocean at sixty, having lived long past his thirty six year’s of life, listening to the wave’s crash, will I instantly drift back to a time in my younger year’s, when I was wrapped up in his arm’s on a beach in Mexico?
Will his voice forever echo through the tree’s on a cool fall morning, stopping me in my tracks as I listen to a sound, I haven’t heard in year’s? Will it alway’s be his face that I see when asked who has my heart? As my daughter prepares to walk down the aisle far into the future, having found a man worthy of her love, will my eye’s meet hers in understanding of the ache his absence bring’s? If our son head’s off to college someday will him and I stand for a moment in silence, as acknowledgement for the man to man talk that will never be given? It’s these thing’s that once were but can never be again, that continually run through my head… Remembering, is all I can do now.
Frederick Buechner once wrote;
“But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”
