In Between

Sometimes, walking around my own home is a disorienting exercise.

Like coming back to visit your hometown after an extended absence, only to realize that time has irrevocably altered the landscape in violation of your recollection. The same, only different, and sometimes unrecognizably different. Yet when you venture down that familiar street, in your inner eye you begin to see again that place you once knew.

A trick of the mind, I suppose. I do marvel, though, at how easy it is sometimes to see the world as I remember it, despite the evidence right in front of me.

Even after a year in the rebuild, I walk through the house with a case of ghostly double-vision, making unconscious (if unnecessary) course corrections in my step counts to pass through cased openings just ever so slightly offset from what they once were. I walk down the stairs expecting to see piles of stuff in a dark, unfinished basement only to be jarred by the clean, well-lit space where bookshelves line walls and a ping-pong table sits in waiting for the next match.

Only the deck seems to offer an escape from the blurred memory, because its design is completely new to take advantage of the glorious view created by the terminal rampage of wind against the trees.

The trees. I miss the trees. I miss the gentle rustle of the leaves, the towering majesty splayed overhead. The view of the eastern horizon has opened, however, and each and every morning, the sun rises again. And when the golden light of the afternoon sun rests on a field of corn, well, it eases the spirit.

I still haven't figure out how to mow the lawn. The patterns established by a dozen years of muscle memory are not easily broken, despite a year's absence during reconstruction. The land doesn't lie the way it once did. The light falls differently, and the shadows are nowhere to be found.

Well, there are shadows, but they are those created by my own imagination.

Walking along the back edge of the property, reminders of what once was still litter the ground, if somewhat sparsely: small shards of broken glass, a magnetic letter from a child's alphabet toy, a partially buried segment of the original brick wall, and fragments of PVC from the original plumbing. And yet over my shoulder stands the rebuild, strong and new. I'm living in two worlds at once.

I look in vain for a single item, a commander's coin given me by then Lt. Gen. Thomas Keck of the Eighth Air Force. I don't expect to ever find it, although I suspect it is likely buried several feet underground, in what was the cavity of a fully uprooted tree. But I look for it anyway, because things that are buried have a habit of coming to the surface, often when we least expect it.

Life goes on, as they say, and I suppose that in time I will make peace with this haunting double-vision. For now, though, I continue to straddle the dimensions, a foot in each world. Maybe I'm the ghost, unable to fully let go the past. Like being in between. What a fascinating thought. I am in between.

And I suppose, in a way, aren't we all?