Posted on by LaRonda Moore

Downsizing

FFfAW 9“We got everything except the piano, right?”

“I think so,” Charlie replied to his wife.

Cindy sits the potted plant from her kitchen window seal on the porch and re-enters the house.  She looks around as if she’s lost or seeing it for the first time.

“It looks so different.”

“What?” He yells from a back room.

“Nevermind,” she softly utters wiping her hand across the abstract print of the foyer wallpaper.  As she stands there she realizes that from her vantage point, she can see the whole house.  She slowly scans the rooms recalling a specific memory for each one.  And when she feels that she has captured all that she needed to, she tells the house that has been her family’s home for over three decades, goodbye.

© LaRonda Moore

[129 wds]
I love comments and welcome feedback!
Inspired by FFfAW Challenge #105
Photo courtesy of Mike Vore

16 Replies to “Downsizing”

  1. So, I watched Denzel Washington in an interview and he spoke of his dying father-in-law…He said around the time of his death he was getting his current house built. He asked his father-in-law if he wanted to see it. His father-in-law grabbed his hand and told him, “make it a home”. Your post made me think of that…when we take away the memories…the furnishings…the effort…no matter how elaborate, they are just houses. But it is what we add to them and the people that fill them that make them homes…

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  5. Well, an empty house would really look different esp. when everything that made it feel familiar is all gone. Then only the memories will remain that even when you sleep and dream, you find yourself going back into that house again and again complete with all its furnitures and fixtures even up to the cobwebs on the ceiling you last saw there.

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