3 North Maple Avenue

          A vacant house in Gail America is rare.  For one thing, there aren't too many dwelling places in this hamlet.   Usually when people do leave, their house is occupied within the week as families scramble to get their children into the school system in Borden County.  This door opens to a place which  was vacated just today.   I secured the key to revisit  the only house that was a home for my daughters with their father and mother together.  

         This 2011 perspective  was bittersweet:  the structure had provided the setting for watching Julie play with her Happy Meal toys and her Barbies.  This house was our homecoming  for  a new baby when Emily arrived in 1987.   TV trays converted to desks when Julie  played "office" with her best friend Holly;  bunnies' nests with pillows and blankets and stuffed animals all nestled together with Emily.....images that are impossible for a Mother to forget.  I just know if I had looked closely enough,  fingerprint smudges could still be seen on doorways and windows and paneling where two little girls steadied themselves learning to walk--and, trying to run without getting caught.

          Painful echoes resonated, too.  As precious as children are, they cannot save a marriage.  The ghosts of lack of trust, respect, communication and ultimate failure at such an important task came haunting as I walked back toward the room I had shared with their father.  For years, while Julie and Emily played in the corner of their rooms, sometimes their mother sat  in the corner of her room--anguished and heart-broken, devastated and demoralized, ashamed and depressed--also playing a game of pretend to make the hurt go away.  Had it not been for those little hands and little feet crawling or walking down the hallway calling out to "Mother," I can only imagine where I would be today.  Angels could not have done a better job of rescuing me.
            Walking into 3 North Maple Avenue was a bit more of an emotional experience than I had bargained for.  I actually thought it would just be fun to see the old home place.  Instead, I left there quite moved by the thought that here the four of us should have been one.

             I closed the door, locked it, and walked off the porch to end my sentimental journey.  At that very moment, I turned to to see  the perfect irony of our old house number.   Three.  So many times it had just been me and Julie and Emily.  Three could not hold up four walls, and so they all came tumbling down. 

             Recovery from relationship failure is a lifetime sentence. And at 607 Stadium Drive--only 100 yards northwest of the old house--I do my best everyday to wake up and move forward in order to invest in those two young lives who are  not so little anymore. One plays office for a living while the other would love to let her Third Graders build bunnies' nests instead of worry about TAKS tests.  Both remain my angels.

              A house is one of many collateral losses when divorce takes place. It becomes a symbol of failure.   After I divorced, I tried buying new furniture and new carpet and decorating with new wall art.  Doing so was a band-aid and, granted,  band-aids do serve a purpose.  But sometimes they just cover up the gaping hole that is still present.  The old house is a shell of what it was 27 years ago when we first moved to Gail.  In some ways, so am I.  

              Still, the three of us  rebuilt our "home."   We did it with staying the course, keeping a routine, forgiveness, and a lot of help from a certain Carpenter. 

              His fingerprint smudges could still be seen, too--in every corner of every room.