One Last Sunset
One last sunset
One day it happens to us all
There really is no endless highway
There is no beginning without and end
A lifetime is always forever
Yet it’s also just the blink of an eye
Depending on one’s perspective
Everything ends.
Seconds, minutes,
hours, days, weeks, years, songs, albums, books and movies, Ina twist or irony,
The Never Ending Story ended, those lying bastards! Kansas opined that “nothing
lasts forever but the Earth and sky” but that’s wrong. Sometime in the next 2.5
billion years our star Sol will run out of fuel and grow into a red giant and
destroy the Earth. In layman’s terms, that’s about the time they will finish
working on the freeways around here.
There a likely a
google [one followed by 100 zeros] of words written about endings. Most of the
words are probably about relationships ending or lives that have ended. But I
have a few to add.
As noted earlier
this year, Mom is moving out of the house she has occupied for the last 44
years. Well the deadline is here. Barring something going terribly wrong, as of
Monday May 19th, 2025, it will belong to another family.
On the one hand it
is ‘just a building.’ Someplace you keep your stuff while you’re out making
money to go and buy more stuff. But of course it’s also more than that. For 16
years it was my home. The front bedroom was “my room” even if it remains
“Chaz’s room’ or ‘your brother’s old room’ to the immediate family. The place
where I slept, listened to music, read, watched TV, played guitar and did NOT
do my homework. There are of course many other memories. The time my parents
went to Pennsylvania for a weekend and I had a few friends over and scratched
the table playing quarters. The volleyball party where the lines were defined
by weed eating them into the grass. Certain young ladies writing on my car
windows in lipstick – but they did leave me a donut. The large contingent of
people crowded in when they came to town for my sister’s wedding. Grandma and
Grandpap Sheet’s last trip to Texas to meet their newest great grandchild,
Shelby. “Vegamatic!” 31 games [“No mercy at the card table”]. Of course so many
holidays, a couple of graduation parties, 40th birthdays… they’re
just buildings but they’re homes because of what happens inside.
It’s mostly empty
now. Surprisingly, it’s had very little work done. The master shower was redone
recently more out of necessity than desire. Wallpaper, carpet, tile, paint. But
no other major renovation. It hasn’t truly been empty since we moved in in
January of 1981. Right now, knowing it is the last time or almost the last
time, it just seems to be empty shell. All of the things that made it a home
are now somewhere else. The only thing remaining is the ghosts / memories that
I have brought with me.
I am on the porch
with a chair and a tall boy watching the sun sink into the trees that marked
the edge of “The Berry’s property.” They haven’t been there for a couple of decades
but it’s still The Berry’s just like it’s Chaz’s room.” A rain cooled breeze
swirls and eases some of the humidity. The sun and the clouds are cooperating.
It’s an incredible ongoing mix of reds, golds and purples as if God himself has
ordered up one last spectacular show just for me.
And really it is.
Think about that. Each moment of our lives passes and it is gone.
Some few are
captured in photographs or whatever this digital business is called or burned
into memories [based on our own perspective, of course] but like most of the
2.5 billion heartbeats in an average life, the moments pass without being
noticed or cataloged. Of course right now I have a head full of memories
fighting to surface right now.
My dad, he doesn’t
give a fuck for nostalgia or the past. It’s just the way he is. But Mom is sort
of nostalgic and my sister and I get that from her to varying degrees. I felt I
had to have some private time to look around and have one more sunset. One last
run up Russell Lane although at a much more normal speed than I used to race
down it when I was a teens. The poor neighbors had that white dust covering
their yards every time I went up that road. Surprisingly that straight six
Duster [irony] did a fair rip up that quarter mile. The V-8 Caprice… it might
not have been old school Detroit muscle but it could move when you stomped it.
I’m watching the
sun fade one more time. I hear a train in town. It’s comforting and familiar
and sad because “they” have silenced the train horns as they go through Fort
Worth now unless some dipshit is trying to beat the train. The train will roll
on to God knows where. I think that the engineer may never look out his window
in wonder at the sunset and contemplate that no two sunsets are the same. Not
even if one was at the same exact spot at exactly the same time every day.
As I take the
photos [which just do not get as dark as it is outside, I don’t know if it’s a
filter or what] and feel the breeze I think about the trees that were here but
are now gone. I laugh at the hedgerow Mom put in to block out the neighbors
that moved in after the Hendricksons moved to wherever. I remember summer days
riding the tractor around cutting the grass. How many times has the grass been
mowed?!? I remember the old tin shack, red painted one stall lean to put up by
my dad and me and Uncle Bill and I look at the ‘new’ barn… what a difference.
Finally, it’s time
to go. One last pee, sho\ut off the lights and close the garage door. One last
sanely slow trip down Russell to the county road and then… well I had to run
some interstate miles to clear my head after this little nostalgia trip
In ten years, we
[the family] will refer to this house as ‘the place over on Russell.’ In twenty
years, it will just be “the place your grandmother lived when she was your
age.” In fifty, MAYBE a photo of the
place one of Shelby’s children’s great-great grandmother lived. In a hundred
years, the Galupi name will just be a name on an old paper deed or a digital
file in the tax records.
Will the house
still be standing? The barn? What will it look like? Will the current
“occupant” have any idea of how for 40+ years a family lived here, loved here
through all of the good and bad, happy and sad and the memories that come with
a lifetime? Will one of them look out over the trees and wonder at how every
sunset is slightly different?
