practical faith

Dear readers,

Blessed Easter!

tkwek

Remembrance

I walked up the same steps and slipped the same key into the faded gold-colored lock and turned that same doorknob and walked into the house, with half a fairy-tale sensation hanging in my heart. It was a house I’d spent seven-and-a-quarter years of my life (excluding our nine-month sojourn in Manchester) growing up in, eighty-seven months clouded with memories that stretched them to a hundred.

The living room seemed smaller than I’d always imagined it (ever since we moved out three years ago) and so did the dining room and kitchen. Somehow the staircase was narrower, the light-switch was too far down and the bathroom-screen was shorter, too. But then I remembered with a jolt that my last memory of the place was when I’d been a head and a half shorter – and a completely different person.

I came to the bay window where I’d always used to practice my violin, and the empty spot where the sofa once was where I’d always taken my afternoon naps. I felt the kitchen counter where I’d always pause every night to pour myself a glass of milk, and the tabletop on the second floor where I’d do my homework while waiting for that familiar clink to tell me Dad was home. I sat in the space that was my bed, just as I’d sat through countless nights wondering if a burglar might somehow creep into the house.

It was strange that the things which struck me as I paced about the silent rooms were not the parties or dinners that we threw in the hall downstairs, or the rare impromptu sleepovers. It was the small things that I remembered the clearest, how I’d raised my broken arm in a plastic bag over my head when I showered to keep it dry, how I’d hidden in the storeroom to give Mom countless surprises, how I’d run out in the rain to rescue our star tortoises when the monsoon flooded their sandbox.

I remembered the little scoldings by the dinner-table, the first piano lessons, the stepping-into-the-house-after-a-holiday feelings. I remembered the long walks up the path behind the house, and the long walks the other direction to my Grandma’s house to watch the lion dances every Chinese New Year.

Finally, as I stepped into the backyard, I found the place overgrown with wild grasses and shrubs, forming a greenish veil to where I’d once fed the neighbors’ chickens, killed snakes and formulated my own ‘sword dance’ with the bamboo poles. It was disconcerting, and for a second I felt like that part of my life was only a fragment of the past now, with little to remember it by.

And perhaps it wasn’t just my childhood which was overgrown and forgotten, perhaps it was the childlike and innocuous spirit I once harbored towards everything that was slowly ebbing away.