Maybe one autumn day Danny and I will be on a lazy drive down Route 66 through central Illinois and bend our retired curiosity toward exit 91 off Interstate 72 to revisit that blue door house on Cherokee we walked through for just shy of two years. We'll press our fingertips just barely against the window pane of that early 30s time in our lives when our kids were young and we were young and how we used that roof sometimes like an umbrella and other times like a canopy, and how we danced inside those living room walls and made serious life decisions in that basement. Those kinds of decisions that are funny to us, thinking back on them, because we will have learned by then that the only truly serious decisions we ever made in our lives were the ones when we decided together what really matters, and how anyway, those came easiest.
No matter how far we reach past this blue door, neither of us will be able to quite recall how we spent those last night hours in that house, or what all we stuffed into those boxes or threw into garbage bags beneath the twilight buzz of dim fluorescence. We won't remember which picture frames we took off the walls and wrapped like sacred gifts because at some point along the way, I won't know when, the pictures will be taken off some other wall of some other house and placed inside some other box, never to make it out. Sometimes funny things like that happen, and we don't miss any of those things because we've forgotten they are gone, or if we do long for one thing or another, it is only because we remember how much we miss the person wrapped around its memory.
So whether it is one far day or just tomorrow, driving away from this blue door, if we remember very little except that we lived in this house together, built our family and wondered where life would take us, I can say I won't mind which memories stay inside these walls or which frames get lost forever, so long as, by God's grace, what really matters drives away, back home, with me.
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