Empty Houses

By Rochelle Mitchell

The house felt deserted. A chapter of ours lives was closing. The plants on the windowsill were brown, dry and lifeless. My grandmother always had a green thumb. The front windowsill used to be full of plants. Her house resembled a nursery. Plants hung from the ceiling, every windowsill was occupied, and large succulents sat in heavy metal planters, using every corner of the ranch house. In the kitchen the large spider plant still hung above the steel sink with its runners drooping along the sides of the white ceramic pot, but now, the once green runners were brown and dead.

The living room and kitchen were full of boxes, empty and full. Empty copypaper boxes my parents acquired from work were piled on the living room floor. Mother handed me an aquamarine General Electric mixer. "You may want this. You do a lot of baking."

"Sure, Mom," I said, placing it in a box with the waffle iron and coffee grinder. The mixer was older than me and probably older than my parents. I felt like a ghoul stealing pieces of my grandparent's existence. I realized that a few towels, some books and a mixer meant little in the scheme of things, but it is little things that added up to lifetime. The dishes my father so carefully packed in newspaper, I had eaten on every time I visited my grandparents. My grandmother's tuna casserole belonged on those yellow plates, not my new-age vegetarian cuisine. The books I sat on the backseat were the classics my grandmother begged me to read. Now they would sit on my bookshelves and wait for my daughter to read them.

I made small talk with my Dad while I opened the trunk for him. The trunk slammed down on a trunkload of memories. Then I drove away with pieces of my grandparents' lives sitting in the backseat and trunk of my car.

I went back to the house a few days later. The hanging plant was gone and the copypaper boxes were filled with pots and pans. Tucking newspaper under my arm, I walked down the stair to the basement. I placed a few more items in a box, a brown cookie jar, several plastic and clay pots, and a ceramic elephant planter. While I was there, the next door neighbor knocked on the door.

"Come in," I told her. "No sense standing in the cold."

"You must be the granddaughter," she said, glancing at the boxes piled on the floor.

"My grandparents are moving to Florida." I didn't exactly lie. My parents were planning to move to Florida and take my grandparents with them. It probably won't happen though. "Tell Belle that Ruthie says hello."

"I will." I let Ruthie out and returned to my packing.

-- -Rochelle Mitchell

rochelle@mitchellware.com

URL http://www.mitchellware.com/mitchell/home/rochelle