Seasoning

A perfect night to post more Season of White...
I mean, it's all alabaster out there.

"Why is it that every time I have to say how he died, not because I want to, but because they ask, I get every crash story anyone's ever known?"

"People are not cats, A. They don't know when to back off."

"Look what someone sent me yesterday," I said, handing him the postcard of the house in the feral house series. Trees were growing almost through it. Shrubs coming from the windows, the porch overrun and penetrated by roots and plants.

It was exactly the kind of thing that I would normally adore: the wildflower beauty of it, the inadvertant, accidental beauty in dilapidation. A stand against the perfect. And the house, so much my kind of house that I might have lived there once, had, in fact, lived there with Sam when we were terribly young and insanely in love.

It's cool. Detroit, you must hate to see what's happening there, huh?

And I'm sobbing, like that, because I have to let Aram know and he will hurt for me and then I'll be sad for his helpless-sadness and for me and Sam, our home, always, until this stupid postcard: our home and isn't this why I left there, not to see this, not to see change which I hated so much that I would rather erase a whole city than change the sheets on the bed we shared? Figuratively, of course, except those sheets, that last set were sealed off in one of those vacuum-sealed bags from the pharmacy. What was us mummified, and thrown in the hatchback.

Oh God, Annie, that was your house, wasn't it?

"Not the final house, no. The house we rented back in college. Our first shared-place, it was cheap because we did so much of the painting, dug a garden, played house before we the real thing. It was some of our happiest days, Sam in the yard waiting for me when I came home, holding a kite and everything in me soaring up to meet it all."