Deep thoughts at the end of a phase of my life

I was sitting here tonight, probably the last night I will ever step foot in the home I grew up in, played in, slept in, wept in, laughed in, cried in, raised one of my children in, came back to multiple times during the course of my life when things got rough for me, alternately loved and detested, cleaned, made messes in, learned both joy and pain in.

A lot of my past has come creeping out to pat me on the virtual head tonight, as I sorted through family photos and got them boxed up to go to storage.  Friends and family members now dead or gone their own ways came back for that brief second to offer a nod and a glimpse at what was.  Many of the memories have been good.  Just as many of them weren't so pleasant.  And then I stopped and sat for a while asking myself why I was lingering on some of those memories.

I've spent the majority of my life in and out of this house.  It has been a fixture throughout the years, a point of stability.  It has been, more than any other place or person or idea or institution, the solid point of reality that I could return to no matter where I was in life or what was going on.  And that point of solid reality is now gone.  The lifetime spent living and learning here is over.  The walls of this house will soon echo with another family's laughter and tears, to find a mirror in the mists of forgotten memory and time.

My roots have been severed, and I'm not certain yet where or when the tree will be replanted.  I don't know whether it will retain the strengths it gained here, or lose them and grow in a completely different direction and form now.  Summer's over, and my life has entered it's Autumn.