What Remains?

When winter turned to spring my father would sweep the ash from the firebox and place six birch logs on the andirons. Those silvery white logs functioned as a signal of the change of seasons and seemed like pure treasure to me. They were carefully chosen from a fallen birch and stored year to year in our basement. They remain with me as a small snapshot of childhood and how the simplest of things etched the deepest memories.

I am often struck by the impermanence of life and how all we hold dear will one day vanish-if much hasn’t already. Our childhood home deeply vetted by years of our footprints and fingerprints - echoes of our voices, our joys, and our struggles - all left behind with the last closing of the front door -but never forgotten.

If I close my eyes, I can easily find myself walking through this small ranch house and retracing the fundamental years of my life. Are these perhaps the primary building blocks of life that remain sealed in the neuroscience of our brains? The plastic statue of Mary on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, the cast iron radiator in the bathroom where my mother would warm our towels before a bath, the bump in the sheetrock in the hallway left by some wrestling antics on a Saturday night. Funny, I am imagining that none of this had to do with the size of our house, the quality of the furniture or the paintings on our walls. Each memory is a trace of interchange between us- the things we were taught to value or learned to value by osmosis. The simplicity of a white birch log set that’s never left my mind after sixty long years of compacted brain clutter – the apple tree with the best apples in the land- the big rock in the yard where we played ‘King of the Hill’.

As we forge our way forward in a world of shifting values, the significance of life seems to lie in the pencil marks of growth left on the kitchen door jamb-that you couldn’t bring yourself to paint over - the blue tempera-paint handprint that remains on the dining room windowpane -the soul tended to and curated by moments shared and the pure and simple knowledge that bigger is not always better and that there is nothing more valuable than time spent together. No clear or essential reach - for riches, for more -for distant stars, but time spent here on earth watching them glow. Letting our treasures lie in the simplicity and beauty of what our souls really crave. There may be no point higher than comfort- in wanting what you have- in loving who you know. Investing in the very essence of the life we’ve been given. When all else vanishes that is what remains.