Today, the place where I was born stands empty of any building. I parked my rental car at the back of the property and set looking at the open lot all the way from the alley to the main street. The lot is smaller than I remember it being when I grew up there. My mom and dad owned two businesses there: a retail clothing store and a barber shop. Attached was the living quarters made up of a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bathroom on the bottom floor and one bedroom and bath in the attic which was the room of my youth. The back yard had a guava tree and a chinaberry tree. It was from the latter that my mom would pull a branch to make into a switch when she punished me for breaking her rules. Beyond those was a carport where my dad parked his car. It just didn’t look like all that could fit onto that narrow piece of land that I was looking at, but it did and it seemed like there was room to spare in those days.

I am reminded from this brief moment of visiting the past that things that seemed big in life, I discovered later were really small in comparison to the time, energy, and money that I gave them. Today, things don’t seem so big to me anymore because I know that in just a brief short time I will see them at their real size.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous.