Tearing down

I was driving to work, and I saw this pile of rubble and a bulldozer actively pushing all the debris together. I couldn’t believe it. That building has been empty and for sale for awhile and has served a lot of purposes over the last fifty years, but it’s always been a reference point for me.

It was at the bottom of the street I grew up on, a furniture store with big show room windows. It is a place of endless memories. I was a tiny toddler when my parents picked out a couch and love seat. I remember walking from room to room, amazed at couch after couch. We were taken up to a storage attic to look at the bargain stuff because Mom asked to see something on sale. They picked out a a black leather set they found in the storage space, dusty, with a broken foot. Dad fixed the foot, good as new and Mom English Leathered the upholstery and I spent my entire youth watching TV and reading books and napping on that furniture.

The building also marked the southern boundary of my neighborhood. The smooth concrete and interesting pillars made excellent terrain for bike riding, roller skating and skateboarding. All the neighborhood kids gathered there to weave in and out of the columns or to race on the wide parking lot.

We have a family legacy story about the loading dock. My brother, in his cowboy and lasso days, tied a rope to a bolt on the loading dock and tried to lasso kids as they rode their bikes past. He missed everyone, until he didn’t, catching a girl in my first grade class around the neck. The rope held tight, reinforced by the bolt, and she was jerked off her bike, and nearly strangled. My brother automatically let go of the rope and we all rushed to her to make sure she was okay. She had a serious rope burn around her neck. We all knew it was bad. So we did what all Gen X kids did when we knew we were in serious trouble. We put the evidence (bikes and ropes) away and sat inside playing a board game on a summer day. No squabbling. Picture perfect faces of innocence. But of course the parents brought the girl over to show my parents the bruise the rope had left. It’s sort of hard to explain that kind of damage as an accident, but my brother cried and even today when he tells the story, the shock of actually catching her comes through. I don’t know what happened to that girl. She moved away, but we never forgot her.

So maybe that’s why, all these years later, I always automatically glance at the building in my travels through town. It’s a reference to my youth.

I have been thinking about moving. But I have felt a little paralyzed in that decision. There are lots of places I love. Philadelphia brings me a kind of energy and vitality that makes me feel alive and open to new possibilities. I love the magnolias and history in Virginia and feel so at home and peaceful there. I dream of waking eveey morning and walkimg on the beaches of Alaska or Oregon or New Jersey, throwing driftwood for a designer doodle. And I can even see waking up in my sister-in- law’s A-frame in the Philippines and gazing out at the sunrise on the Pacific. Yet, I am still here in this small town I equally love and loathe in the same measure. It holds all of my history.

Maybe that’s why the tearing down of the old furniture store struck me at my very core. Sometimes everything has to be stripped away before something new can be built. I feel like I have one foot planted in the life I’ve always known and the other hovering over a future I haven’t quite had the courage to step into. A tattered, frayed tether still holds me in place—not because this town is perfect, but because it contains the map of who I have been.

But as I watched the bulldozer push the last piles of brick and timber into a heap, I realized something. The building is gone, but the memories aren’t. My parents are still picking out that bargain couch. My brother is still standing there in his cowboy hat, horrified by the impossible throw he never meant to make. Somewhere, a little girl is still weaving her bike through those pillars. Those places don’t disappear when the walls come down. They travel with us.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been waiting to understand. Leaving doesn’t mean abandoning my history. It just means carrying it somewhere new.