My home will be home to someone else's memories


It's one of those conversations you expect to have when you get older. Not when you're still thinking about paying off your student loan and just starting to consider your 401k.

 But as my brother recently said, we ARE getting older. All our favorite songs are on the classics station.

The call I've been expecting from my mother in Illinois finally came the other day. She bought a new house. That means, of course, the house I grew up in, the only house I've ever lived in where I wasn't paying the rent myself, will soon be up for sale, and eventually will be home to a new family's memories. 
I feel like that should upset me, and I'm upset that it doesn't.
There's no point in keeping it. I have absolutely no plans to move back and neither does my brother. It's a good move for Mom. Our small town is about 15 miles from the bigger city in the county. Mom's job, her friends, her family, all are
in the larger town. Property taxes are ridiculous, upkeep on the house is getting to be more than she can handle, and the price of gas is even worse there than it is here.
So it's time. And I'm OK with it.
Besides that, almost everything I loved about the house is gone, starting, of course, with my father's death in 1998. But even before that, my childhood already was disappearing. The fort Dad built us where we stored all our outdoor toys and played our own kid version of 'The Blue and the
Gray' 1,000 times was deconstructed years ago. The pool that suddenly made us popular with the neighbors and the deck that went with it were sold, even before I left for college. The weeping willow tree was sacrificed for the expansion of power lines on our road. The porch Dad built on the front of
the 'shop' to cover his work area was taken down by the men who installed Mom's new garage door.
The only question I have is whether our cat, Sherman, should be disturbed from his final resting place in the backyard.
Of course there's other 'stuff' inside, but Mom's taking most of that with her. So I guess I'm OK with the move.
I had a bigger nervous breakdown when she changed her phone number.
After Dad died, Mom received an inexplicably high number of prank phone calls, which forced her to change and unlist the phone number we'd had for more than 30 years.
I'll never forget the day I didn't remember it was changed and called the old number out of habit. Thank God no one answered. Instead I listened to the answering machine greeting of a family I didn't know. My family's old
number had been reassigned. I almost cried.
Did the new family know what they were inheriting? Do they know how special that number is? Do they realize how many dimes were put in the pay phone by the gym to be able to call that number and get a ride home from school? 
Could they imagine how many tears were shed, how many problems were solved, how many checks were written as a result of dialing those 10 numbers? 
That number was my comfort line and now it's someone else's. I guess it's time to move on and let the house be someone else's, too.