Feeling Home

Going home is always an emotional gumbo. It’s a heaping helping of tears, joy, loss, anticipation, harsh realities, and epiphanies.

The weird thing about the new meds is that they allow my brain to produce more serotonin which in turn keeps me from being a tearful mess. I can drive by Grandma Grindles’s farmhouse now and feel……nothing.
While it was exhausting to feel so deeply every minute of every day, it is somewhat disturbing to know that the memories are there but they elicit very little feeling. I feel like I’m not honoring the most important aspects of what made me the person I am today. I wanted to think more about Rama, my cat who ran away to die somewhere on Shields road, as we drove down that very road last Friday. The memory of him used to haunt me…the guilt and pain has been crushing over the years.

 I wanted to remember the cook-outs on the brick patio behind my little house on Youngstown-Salem road, and the huge Willow tree I played in that was removed years ago. Or the bleeding hearts that grew along the garage side of the house. It used to hurt deeply when I remembered those days and the fact that they were gone forever, but it also brought them back for an instant so I could be there, if only for a second. Now, when we drove by, I couldn’t really think of very much at all.

I guess it’s better to not hurt so much. It’s probably better for my heart, like a glass of red wine. But shit…these places deserve more from me. So many loved ones are gone now and the places hold their spirits.
We stayed in my Aunt Vera’s little house in Youngstown. I spent almost as much time there, growing up, as I did in the houses in Canfield, or up at the farm. The house is virtually the same. Two years ago, when I stood in the Grindle house I wept like a baby and could barely look around. Yet there I was in my 92 year old Aunt’s house where everyone in my family, living or dead, has been over the years and it still felt like home, don’t get me wrong, but the enormity of it just didn’t sink in. My room was in the attic. Climbing those stairs would have undone me just two months ago.

 My daughter sat on those stairs when she was 4 or 5 and cried because she left her teddy bear at a house where my parents and my Aunt and Uncle had taken her to visit one summer evening. They told her they’d get the bear the next day but she cried anyway and even wrote me a letter expressing a child’s utter disbelief that her Me Me and Pop Pop would make her sleep without her teddy bear! Oh the injustice!

I climbed the very stairs where that drama unfolded. (She still sleeps with the teddy bear, by the way, these 25 years later.)

My sister and I went past so many places during our visit to Ohio. We watched a 4^th. of July parade down Main Street in Canfield, just as I did every year of my life until I moved away. The last time I saw that parade my Grandmother and parents were still alive and my brother had run in the race. I watched the Shiners’ float go by with the Grotto clowns and I remembered Dad.

But this time I mostly thought about my poor choice of clothes for such a hot day. I don’t know if it’s better to feel this way or not.

I guess it’s better for self-preservation.