This is a picture of my family

This house was no longer ours.

When I woke in the morning dim with low, dry clouds, my young son and my younger daughter still asleep sideways in the big bed, the inescapable end was on everything. It was on the kitchen table and coffee press. It was on the well-used toys around the living room floor. In the sunroom full of special stones and sticks picked up along the way. The pictures covering the walls. The small spaces the neighborhood kids used for hide-and-seek and giggling at three crammed into a hiding spot for one. The little garden and the windows.

All the holding all the pieces together was noble, valiant, failed and done.

This house, this place, was no longer ours.

My pity for a life fallen apart was over too though. It was part of what was no longer ours. To the end I gave that also: my small breaks in time with hot eyes and sad, angry fists on the floor. Or those two still sleeping on the big bed, those whom I loved the greatest, would be wronged then by me too. And there was already enough wrong for them.

So walking through the rooms and stairs each move was now new.

But not new in the bright way of a dawn. That forward pace of youth was done for me; it lay behind me on the floor. This was directionless new. New born of acceptance and resolve, not epiphany. The new the carpenter makes, not the artist or the preacher.

And the kids would be awake soon.

And I had to do this before they woke.

We needed our place.

The alley behind and between these old neighborhood houses went that way so I went that way too after walking out of the house. Cars starting early, flowers gardens, small dogs in small yards, robins in grass, clotheslines.

And that way of the alley went to a large yard with a long, flat gravel driveway. To the left, a tall hedge of thick bushes or tight-grown fir-tree forest woods was; I did not look there.

But on my right was a stand of great old trees in rows, not natural but not unbeautiful. Tall and gray brown trunks reaching overhead to a thick and leafless canopy. It was all branches. It was dark under them. And the ground was black and brown and gray. And beyond these trees to the horizon right was another hedge or thick woods or maybe houses, but nothing was for me that way beyond the stand of trees and the gray.

I stepped from the gravel to let my fingers lightly brush the bark of the trunk of one. And there was something to it.

But I was going to the house at the end of the driveway, so I kept moving that way.

The house was like ours, the one that was no longer ours: old and tall and blue. Though this one was worn out. Alive, but slow.

The unpainted thin aluminum screen door shut unquietly behind me, the spring long-rusted and over-used, as I went in. Large and shabby and quiet shadows all around. And full of so many things that in the many-ness what the things were was lost. So many little things. Kids’ things, adult things, animal things; everything everywhere.

The kitchen was a dull yellow lit from above by a bulb muted by unclear glass full of dust and dead insects. A woman, a person my age and a mother, and whom I was here for, to talk of place, sat just out of the light on an old metal-framed kitchen chair, floral cheap plastic cushions cracked, and upside down milk crates all around her with things on their bottoms, which were now their tops.

I sat at the table there. I moved some of the many things aside for my elbow to set. The many dirty dishes and used and dirty halfempty cups and old food and magazines about other people. The counters were filthy full of many half-used things.

So there, as we were supposed to, this woman and I talked.

We talked about the house. I told her I had children and I liked the big yard very much and the old trees and how the house was big and spacious for the kids.

She agreed and told of how her children liked those things as well. She stayed outside of the light. And I never saw her face.

The cupboards were cheap, light brown.

And we talked. Of moving and houses, children and big yards, housework and good roofs and laundry and water heaters.

I heard her children somewhere, but they never came near. And somewhere there I felt a man was too, but he did not come around to us.

And then I thought this was the place for us, my children and I. It was a good house, big, spacious. And the yard was big and I liked the trees. And the lady was nice.

With the word “here” in me, I thanked the mother on her chair from across the room and I walked back to the yard. To the trees. There was no life under these great things. The grass grew only where some light could come down through the thick branches of the tall canopy. There were no birds in them. No squirrels.

But there was no bad. And this place was not dead. I felt the trees so much.

Walking into the stand I again touched one. Laying my hand on her trunk, I knew she was not a happy thing, but she was proud and very strong and old but not very old. The roots of these strong, silent ones were deep. They were tall. They were very strong.

And I thought, “There is space for my children to play under here.”

Ian Kimmer is a father living in Virginia who once was a farmer and usually is found in wild places with his children.