When my brother and I were growing up, our parents marked our heights on the back of the linen closet door in the hallway of 122 Vernon Valley Road. When I was nine, we sold that house and moved across town. I was sad, scared to leave my school, the treehouse in the backyard, but most of all I mourned leaving that door.
Why couldn't we bring it with us? Why would the new owners want it? I didn't understand how no one else felt the urgency of the situation. The gravity of it. Those were our heights, our childhoods marked out in pencil for all those years and no one cared that we were leaving them behind. At nine I already felt like time was moving too fast, that there needed to be some recording of it all.
I've always been a little overly sentimental. I have a tendency to build up the past* in sappy emotional ways. Because of this I have been pleasantly surprised that on this trip, to a place my family vacationed pre-divorce, there has been none of that. Instead, just me, Mike, vacation and the past in the past where it should be. I think this is a good thing.
*to quote 5 Chinese Brothers "Baltimore".
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