Monday, June 04, 2007

Everywhere

Apologies for the lack of posting lately. These last few weeks have been pretty intense.

A couple of weeks ago I had to make an emergency trip back home for my grandmother's funeral. The whole situation was just terrible. She had been sick for several years and we were all prepared, including her. The way it happened is what makes everything so awful. She died from burns suffered in a house fire. My grandfather was able to pull her outside, but the house was a total loss. She survived for two weeks until finally passing.

The whole trip home was very surreal. I got to spend lots of good time with my extended family, seeing people I hadn't seen in years. Everybody was in pretty fair spirits. However, everybody had been dealing with this first-hand. I, on the other hand, was dealing with this a thousand miles away. It was really hard to grasp everything that was happening. I finally asked my cousin to take me to the house.

It was pretty shocking to see this house I had spent so much time in as a child in ruins. Really it wasn't the house that upset me as much as it was the stuff inside the house. My grandmother was a collector of just stuff.... random stuff from garage sales and flea markets. Seeing some of this stuff that had been in their house since before I was born destroyed just devastated me. There was a porcelain cat I used to sit on when I was a kid smashed. The mandolins my dad made when he was a kid were destroyed. The one thing I always remembered from that house was her cuckoo clock. I couldn't find it.

Everything back home is getting better now. My grandfather has an apartment now while he gets his insurance straightened out. He plans on rebuilding on the same property. Everybody is doing just fine, including me now. It was a pretty tough trip home, but there were many more positives about it than negative.

Wow, I planned on just a brief update and a promise to post more. Guess I had more on my mind than I thought! Thanks for reading that.
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