white house. black door.

A few Sundays ago, Mom and I walked passed Aunt B's house. I glanced, as I always do, at the front door. The door that used to be black and is now white; the entrance to a childhood full of happy Sunday afternoons and lazy summer days. "Do you ever think of her when you walk by here?" I shot my Mom an of-course-I-do glance from my side of the sidewalk square. Mother-daughter silent-message relayed, she then asked, "OK. Well, what do you think?" Wanting to avoid the on-the-spot and a somewhat public display of emotions that suddenly crept up on me like the chill of the fall evening, I simply stated, "Just that I spent so many years making such happy memories there." I paused. "And that I miss her." That was about as far as I could go, at least out loud. My mind went farther, though, and so did my feet as I walked down the block alongside my mother.

Aunt B was a believer. She believed in the power of the human spirit, and that anyone could do anything they set their mind to. She believed in using fine silver for the every day and that no thing was too fragile to the touch of a child. Her house was the place where sister could climb to the highest branch in the pine tree out back, and mom would never have to know. I could bedeck myself in her most expensive jewels, fastening the clip-on earrings to my six year-old lobes all by myself as I sat at her vanity. It was a place where we celebrated Christmas in July, or just because it was Tuesday, as we drank sparkling cider and jingled sleigh bells at the kitchen table. At Aunt B's, the in-house restaurant never closed and she never tired of playing the role of sous chef, taking orders from sister and me, unseasoned though we were. The freezer of cherry chocolate bon bons was bottomless. Croquet rules were made to be broken, added to, or ignored altogether. The dancing sprinklers (as we liked to call them) could run for hours at a time, no matter the temperature of the afternoon, and two scoops of ice cream were a necessity.

I've walked passed her little white house dozens upon dozens of times since she's been gone. My feet know how exactly how many steps to take from the church steps to her front door. My head knows the memories housed between the walls of her white-bricked residence and my heart knows that although the gold pineapple door knocker is no longer there to be knocked, I can visit those memories whenever I wish and they will forever resound in my mind.