Returning last week to the small town where my mother grew up brought back a wave of memories. It always does.
My sister showed me the small house where my grandmother once lived, right across the street from the Baptist church. The outside of the place looked vaguely familiar; my sister, although barely a year older, could still describe the inside in great detail. I can’t remember it at all.
Then my aunt took us by the tiny guest cottage behind someone else’s bigger house where my grandfather lived for a time, and although it is barely standing now, I recognized it immediately. I couldn’t shape the interior in my mind but I do remember this: he cooked fried chicken for me there, and a peach tree stood in the back yard.
I’m neat. Not freakishly, compulsively neat – but orderly. I like things to make sense. It pleases me when one thing logically follows another. Like when the conclusion of a good book somehow affirms its beginning. Or when I intuitively reach for something in the place it should be…and it is.
But while there’s comfort in finding things as you expected, where you expected – there’s also something a little thrilling about the odd placements of life. Like the single azalea that bloomed in my hedge this week more than a month after the thousands of others had faded and fallen. Or opening the newspaper last week and seeing that the sports section has been completely redesigned. Or that my favorite neighborhood coffee shop has stopped making pistachio muffins and begun experimenting with cranberries.