It’s morning and I’m standing in my parent’s kitchen making coffee. I walk back to the bedroom that I’ve slept in every Christmas since I got divorced. I sleep in this bedroom now because the bed is smaller and either my brother and his wife or my son and daughter-in-law need the bigger bed now.
While the coffee brews, I make the bed and light a stick of incense, which I place in the wooden incense burner that I borrow from my Southern Baptist mother every year. I chuckle at the little brass Taoist yin/yang symbols embedded in the side of it.
I go back to the kitchen and pour a cup of coffee then return to the bedroom where I sit and read a page from a book of daily thoughts that a friend wrote, after which I say my morning prayers, which follow a fairly verbatim outline. After that I say prayers for who or whatever comes to mind.
Then I just sit for awhile and look at the big mulberry tree standing in front of the house across the street.
I’ve watched this tree on winter mornings from this same vantage point for almost twenty years. I’ve seen several generations of squirrels play chase through its branches and feed around it’s base. At Christmas one year I saw that it had a big scar on the side of its trunk, like a car may have hit it.
Different families have moved in and out of the house, but for the last six or seven years, it's been sitting empty and neglected, abandoned by the previous owners and foreclosed on by some far away bank in New Jersey or somewhere.
Now it appears someone has bought it and is in the process of gutting and remodeling it, probably for resale. And now, out in the yard next to the Mulberry tree, stands a harvest gold double oven; like some monument to the 60s and 70s, when this subdivision was built, it's a testament to every family that's lived there since.
For me it serves as a stoic reminder of passing time and my own mortality.
A psychic pushback against some deep-seated desire for things to stay the same.
I hear the sound of one of my parents shuffling down the hall to the kitchen, followed by the tip tap of their little lapdog’s toenails on the hardwood floors.
A subtle reminder to savor every moment because none of it lasts...
