They painted the door blue.
This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was for Mom and me.
Last weekend I went home to find it taken over by boxes. The house that I had lived in through my high school years will not be mine in just a few weeks.
In my short lifetime, I have lived in five homes, and I am about to live in my sixth. You'd think after five rituals of taking everything I own and putting it in cardboard, purging the things I don't need, and then shoving my life into another residence, it would be easy. But it's not.
It's not because it's Change. And I don't care what anyone says, Change is not easy, whether for better or worse.
It's not just my house that's changing. My grandparents are getting older, which is something I should have forseen, but haven't. How short sighted have I been! They are becoming different, and slowly our relationship is as well. This weekend my mother poured out the difficulty she's had with them since living with them for the past months. Granny is becoming forgetful and harsher, and Pa more short-tempered. Sometimes there's things I don't want to know. I don't want to see the grandparents I have been so close to morph. But I have to. That's now how my bond with my mom works, perhaps strengthened but a different hue of love from when I was in middle school and high school. Now I'm a confidant. Not only to her, but my dad as well as he tries to boil down his business misadventures (not of his doing) and explain how the his bank account could be shrinking under the economic "temps" (see last post).
...There's some things I don't want to know.
But that's what Change is all about, showing you things can't be the same forever, tearing down bridges and walls, and revealing the hidden truth behind them. And when you learn something, something inside of you is changed as well.
They painted the door to the Chinese place my mom and I frequent. My mom had tried to paint the doors to our house, the house we are currently moving out of, a particular shade of jade/blue-green, but failed to capture it in the final project. So when we visited the then new to us Mark Pi's China Gate, my mom gasped at the color of the doors and exclaimed "That's the color I wanted my doors to be!" And as is customary with mom and I, that seemed to stick. Every time we went to Mark Pi's, either I or she would say "Did you know that's the color I/you want the doors?"
It was with the same sort of gasp we discovered that the jade doors are now blue. It seems that Mark Pi's is not immune to Change, but nothing is.
It's a shame that we will never be able to see those jade doors again. But I am sure Mom and I will find another thing to latch onto. We, like our home and our relatives, our relationships and our doors, can change as well.
| Top ↑ |
