My father built our house twice. Once in 1971, out of borrowed money and a stubbornness he called faith. And then again every evening after, in the telling, until the house in his stories had rooms the real one never held.
I am standing in the real one now, the smaller one, deciding what to keep. The buyers come on Sunday. My sister has labelled the furniture with coloured stickers, a small quiet violence of dots: green to keep, red to sell, yellow for the ones we cannot yet agree on. Most of the house is yellow.
For weeks I thought the hard part would be the objects. The radio he fixed four times. The chair with the arm worn pale where his hand went. I braced for them like waves. But the objects turned out to be easy. They are only objects. It was the doorway that undid me.
There is a mark on the frame of the kitchen door, a ladder of pencil lines and dates, where he measured us every birthday: my height, my sister’s, then our children’s when they came. The buyers will paint over it. I stood there with a chisel, thinking I could lift the wood out and carry the lines with me, and I finally understood the thing I had been refusing to see.
The house was never the thing I was keeping. The building was.
The house was never what I was keeping. The building was: the measuring, the fixing, the telling and re-telling. He gave that to me and it does not live in the wood. It lives in the fact that I still measure things. My days. My children. The distance between who I meant to be and who I am.
So I will let the house go. Sunday will come and the dots will do their work. I am keeping the chisel, though. Not for the doorway. For the next thing that needs building.