sitting on my grandparents' couch, i am ten again. i am eight, thirteen, five, all at once. tonight, after dusty golden back roads and gentle, sweeping hills, david and i ate dinner at their home, and when i am there, the world has never changed. they have the same cat, the same seating arrangement, the same photos on the walls. it is a skip in time - a place untouched and safe. a place where i help grandma set and clear the table while grandpa makes coffee. a place where they talk about their courtship and their fifty-five-dollar rent like it was just yesterday.
and i am always enthralled - i always requested "reruns" from my dad's childhood recollections when he'd lay me down to sleep - because this is my legacy. this is the only way i know my blood has been knit into the greater fabric of time, of humanity. it reminds me there is no 'here and now' but only 'everywhere and always'. the community of family across generations -all the little things remembered- reminds me that God has got a great story in place. and i am a sucker for a good story.
and yet, even as i write this, i think of the clock on their wall, ticking by the seconds. grandpa yawning, conversation waning. their hair, a little more white than grey. their movement, a little slower, their memories, a little foggier. the photographs -yellowing. and a crack appears on my heart in preparation for the inevitable. the deterioration of time. even at a little white house on a gravel road in carlisle, the illusion is temporary. and i am twenty-five.
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