Taking Down the Pictures

“When you take down a picture, this place becomes a house,” she said. 

I said I thought she wanted to wait until our daughter and grandson came to visit. ‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s no point.’  

‘Becomes a house.’ I thought she meant that when you take down a picture your house, especially one you’ve lived in for 35 years, becomes even more your house, something like the way spraining your wrist and trying to make breakfast reminds you of the wonders of your own body. But no, she meant a home going back to what it was when you moved in, a house that might become a home. 

It was only yesterday she said she wanted to wait until they went back to North Carolina after their visit. Then we’d take up the final sprint for our own move there, a cause Gail has championed for more than a year. 

“You know, this is the first time I’ve heard you say anything sad about leaving here.”

“But I’ve felt it,” she said. “There are times when I’ve cried every day. Every time you take down a picture, it reminds you of what was happening when you put it up.”

And there are so many of these pictures, or wall hangings, to include them all: 

—Woven baskets on the kitchen walls; 

—My father’s copper tooling of a tiger and tigress in the tall grass, a visionary ferocity from my childhood that Blake could have made, if he’d known copper tooling; 

—Paintings with words, like our daughter’s painting of an unclothed woman seen from the back, with text from Warsan Shire on a man who “compares you . . . [to] a horse running alone and he tries to tame you.” Printed on the back edge of the canvas in her handwriting, unseen for more than a decade since Gail put it up: “My mother is a queen.” 

—Our younger son’s colored drawing of mystical penguins, heads tilted up and to the left, seeing the wind or the snow at the moment of its transubstantiation into the Penguin God who, as the painting persuades you, is the true God. Gail’s Modigliani-influenced women, one alone, one with infant. Jesse’s Skydiver falling or floating over a moonlike planet, no pull strings to open the parachute on his back . . .

The place where we raised our children. The last place Jesse lived. His flowering tree in the back yard. The addition we built on this 1940s cape when Gail’s father died and her mother came to live with us. She’s gone too. Now, the final sprint for our own move to North Carolina. Everything going into boxes. 

It’s all echoes in here. But a house still speaks.