Legacy
First off, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! I've been gone for a minute so I'm not sure anybody still reads this. I didn't want to come back without being able to have a little more positive outlook on life. Reading and writing about the depressing things in my life just got, well, depressing.
But this is what forced me out of hiding! I happened to be surfing, which I rarely do. I usually visit the same 7 or 8 sites and check my email incessantly. But just so you know what "this" is, that would be what used to be my grandparent's house. I was upset when we weren't able to keep it in the family. I couldn't even walk through my old block once I knew the house had been sold. But then I saw this picture. And to see the before and after pic is just jarring. That house, that green house, was, for me, my family's legacy. Every good feeling I had about growing up came from what happened inside that house. My grandparent's legacy has to now live on through my actions because there's nothing physical to go back to. 179 Monroe Street is now nothing more than somebody else's address. A "fedders" house to pack more bodies into. Whoever has the address when all is said and done will never know the meaning it has for me. And I'm just offended by the eyesore that someone's building in the place where my mom grew up and then I turned around and did the same and then 8 years later my mom told me she was going to have another baby, where I developed my grandfather's love for jazz and baseball, where I crashed my wrist through the glass kitchen door the same day I took a Girl Scouts First Aid class and wrapped it up myself while my panicked aunt called 911, where my grandfather bought a sprinkler system so I could where my bikini in the backyard (I was 9!), where I spent many a night in the bedroom upstairs right above my grandparent's and had a bird's eye view of the entire block, where all the men wanted to kick me out of the room because I had too many questions while they were just trying to enjoy a football game, where my cousins came and watched Star Wars and Bruce Lee and Last Dragon day in and day out, where we met my Filipino cousins for the first time but I had to wear a scarf over my mouth because I'd contracted an infection and didn't want to make them sick. The memories are endless. Maybe that's really where the legacy lives. In the good, the bad and all the in between. The house was just a vessel. Right?
But this is what forced me out of hiding! I happened to be surfing, which I rarely do. I usually visit the same 7 or 8 sites and check my email incessantly. But just so you know what "this" is, that would be what used to be my grandparent's house. I was upset when we weren't able to keep it in the family. I couldn't even walk through my old block once I knew the house had been sold. But then I saw this picture. And to see the before and after pic is just jarring. That house, that green house, was, for me, my family's legacy. Every good feeling I had about growing up came from what happened inside that house. My grandparent's legacy has to now live on through my actions because there's nothing physical to go back to. 179 Monroe Street is now nothing more than somebody else's address. A "fedders" house to pack more bodies into. Whoever has the address when all is said and done will never know the meaning it has for me. And I'm just offended by the eyesore that someone's building in the place where my mom grew up and then I turned around and did the same and then 8 years later my mom told me she was going to have another baby, where I developed my grandfather's love for jazz and baseball, where I crashed my wrist through the glass kitchen door the same day I took a Girl Scouts First Aid class and wrapped it up myself while my panicked aunt called 911, where my grandfather bought a sprinkler system so I could where my bikini in the backyard (I was 9!), where I spent many a night in the bedroom upstairs right above my grandparent's and had a bird's eye view of the entire block, where all the men wanted to kick me out of the room because I had too many questions while they were just trying to enjoy a football game, where my cousins came and watched Star Wars and Bruce Lee and Last Dragon day in and day out, where we met my Filipino cousins for the first time but I had to wear a scarf over my mouth because I'd contracted an infection and didn't want to make them sick. The memories are endless. Maybe that's really where the legacy lives. In the good, the bad and all the in between. The house was just a vessel. Right?
posted by BabyGirl at
1:35 PM
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