Teardown - March 15 2023

 

Teardown

March 15 2023

The home I grew up in

was torn down

after my parents left;

the new owners

built bigger, and fancier

and had money to spend.

As the walls expanded outward

the red maple sapling

my father planted

the year of my birth

was unceremoniously axed.

By then

it towered over the yard

and sheltered the house,

every fall

a thick blanket of leaves

turning the lawn a fire red.

The suburban street

I walked to school

is unrecognizable.

The ambitious city

grew up around it,

filling in,

smoothing out

its rough edges,

putting up

more stylish establishments.

So it has now somehow become

more citified

refined

unnatural.

While I made a home somewhere else,

my brothers moved away,

my parents died.

So in the place of my childhood

I feel an outsider;

there is no hometown, anymore,

and I am a foreigner there.

These attachments

we imagine inviolable

are so easily torn.

You begin to feel untethered

in a world that changes too fast.

Where only memory persists;

and even that depends

on how inclined one is

to indulge in nostalgia.

That is, if nostalgia

   —   literally, the “pain of home”   —

is any indulgence at all.

If only memory

was more reliable.

And looking back

didn't seem a waste of time,

or too sentimental,

or too romanticized.

Not when we believe in eyes front

a brighter future

the next big thing.

Especially since the past is a foreign country

where they did things differently

and you no longer fit in.

Which I know

because the last time I visited

I felt like an anthropologist

peering through glass.

Traffic was impossible.

The school was gone.

And I soon got lost

cruising the neighbourhood

looking for the old street,

the lot

where the house once stood.