We have folded up the walnut-finish dinner table, a worn but functional hand-me-down, and stacked the chairs against a dining-room wall. The room now serves as our own little self-storage unit.
We tread carefully from living room to kitchen. Boxes filled with high-school yearbooks, wedding albums, china and newspapers from New Year's Eve 1999, allow for only a narrow, dark passage.
Duck, or you'll bump your head on the chandelier.
In the kitchen, buried underneath the clattering collection of mismatched dinnerware, I find an old notebook " the crinkled green pages of a stenographer's pad.
On the next page, more of my handwriting. On each line is scribbled an exact time.
6:27.
6:34.
6:37.
6:42.
6:45.
6:47.
6:49.
It's amazing, the stuff you come across " the old forgotten memories you stumble over " when you begin the task of clearing out your home of nearly a decade.
We've already come across the dog's first license, and laughed hysterically about the afternoon we brought her home from the Humane League. We let her off the leash at the front door, and she ran like the wind toward the busy New Holland Pike.
We hadn't named her yet, so we chased her across the neighborhood shouting, "Hey, dog! Dog, get back here!"
We've gone over the family cookout when, in the midst of cooking steaks on the grill, the propane tank went kaput. And the time we invited all our neighbors over for a deck party, only to have the skies open up; a dozen of us took shelter beneath our front porch and ordered pizza, watching the rain.
And the bay window at the front of the house " we remember it for the blustery November evening, just after Thanksgiving, we came home from Women & Babies with our newborn daughter. The whole trip, we kept peering into the back seat, making sure the girl was OK. At home, a huge cardboard sign covered the window: "Welcome home, Hillary," it read.
We remember the front yard for an overcast Easter morning a year and a half later, when we peeked out the window and found, to our surprise, the grass covered with those little pastel eggs. The girl tottered outside in her pajamas, shrieking with joy.
And the deck, just off the kitchen. We remember shoveling a path to the grill and cooking hamburgers in the midst of a Nor'easter. On a springtime Sunday morning, we tried our hand at cooking bacon in a pan, on the grill, only to see " a few minutes too late " the whole thing go up in flames when the fat caught fire.
We are, as far as I can tell, the third family to own this red brick semi-detached since it was built in 1952. I can't even imagine what its walls have seen over the decades: births, deaths, first steps, last steps.
Where does the time go?
6:27.
6:34.
6:37.
6:42.
6:45.
6:47.
6:49.
That green steno page, I remember now, is a written account of my wife's contractions in November of 2003. I called the doctor at 6:49, when they were consistently two minutes apart. We lived an entire lifetime, it seemed, in the space of those two minutes.
And now. And now the girl is just old enough to help us pack.
Goodbye, old house.
CONTACT US: tmurse@LNPnews.com or 481-6021. The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.
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