Member-only story
Seventeen Again
Snapshots of My Parents’ House
Looking back at the vegetable garden and me
It wasn’t my house. I’m one of those people who likes to get his nose into other people’s things, places, and memories. So there I was, one late evening in May, a thief, searching through a pile of old things, scrambling my way through the attic of my mother’s house. Well, it’s not technically her house anymore either. It’s my sister’s.
There was this conclave a very long time ago, in a time when my father was still alive, and everyone else was still young, when our parents — without any knowledge from us, the children — got together and decided what each child would inherit after their death.
My little sister would get a down-payment for a house when she got married, which happened sooner than everyone expected. I, would get the apartment I was then living in with my young and little family. And my middle sister would get my parent’s house and all the land around it. It wasn’t much. Do not imagine Buckingham Palace.
My parent’s house, and for nineteen years, my house too, was a house on a corner, a house with a front yard, and a back yard, and some annexes where my mother used to cook in summer. It had a little garden with some vegetables neatly arranged in rows — tomatoes, potatoes, some red…
