‘It’s Gonna Be a Hot One’
Cicadas and memories and packing up ‘the house’
It may be common, a rite of passage, but packing up a childhood home after a parent’s death is never easy. For Patricia Lampl, it’s also full of memories, like cicadas screaming and her mother declaring, “It’s gonna be a hot one.” This week in Boomer’s From Our Readers.
“It’s gonna be a hot one.” I could hear my mother’s voice as though she were standing next to me. The cicadas were screaming the weather forecast when I stepped out of my car at the curb of her house. She always said that on a summer’s morning when the cicadas were in full blast. I was there to continue the pack-and-throw job of dismantling the house she lived in for 53 years. My parents came to this house with my toddler brother from the apartment they lived in and I was born a year later. They bought the house in Syosset on the GI Bill for $17,000. Sally and Herb were untarnished American dreamers.
I can imagine the sense of accomplishment and glee they must have felt when they bought it. They were first generation and grew up in apartments. My mother was literally born in a two-room apartment and shared a bed with my aunt. Imagine owning a house where her two children would have their own rooms and there was space to dance. Imagine.
Right now I feel the full weight of the house on me. I know my brother does too. It’s what’s now left of our childhoods. My head is spinning with memories ranging from my parents and their friends chasing our escaped parakeet with dish towels at a party, to the crushing silence after my father died far too young. A house that is a home holds a lot of life and becomes part of the family. It’s “the house.” I won’t turn the key in that door again or turn down this street. It will exist for us now as a phantom limb.
I realize that this is not a unique situation and that a women’s magazine or book would call it a rite of passage. It sure is. Out situation is only slightly unique now because there was never the downsizing from house to condo to assisted living to nursing home. In true fightin’ Irish fashion my mother always swore that she’d be carried out of the house in a box – she was. A note to my daughter – my idea of assisted living is a doorman building in New York City!
I wonder what my daughter will wrap carefully from our home and what she will throw in a box hoping some charity will do pickups so she doesn’t have to load it in her car. I hope she wants my yellow china. Will she hear me singing show tunes or yelling, “Come on. We’re late!”? I hope she’ll miss me.
Most would think that the Waterford china I’ve come to pack is the valuable item to be taken from “the house.” The thing of value that I’m taking is the sound of cicadas and Good Humor truck bells – the memory of my brother and I running down the lawn to get an ice cream. Of my mother calling to my father, “Herb, do you want one?” Of my family standing on the lawn eating those ice cream pops. On a hot one.
Read more like Patricia Lampl’s memories of mother, cicadas, and her declaration, “It’s gonna be a hot one.” In Boomer’s
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