Home

 I went home over the Labor Day weekend. My parents are both dead. It's just my brother and me. He married at 26, and that wife left sixteen years later. He was upset because he had tried really hard to make it work and it didn't, because of her. 

The second wife is a nice person. She brought three children into the relationship. The oldest is one of my soulmates. The second one played basketball in school and is now a lawyer. The third one is a marketing specialist. 

We have a farm, where he still lives. My parents' house, where I grew up, is still there. My mother lived in it for 29 years after my father died of lung cancer. 

After my father died, Mother gradually ran out of steam. Dad had been her rock, and her backup, in ways that I don't think she let herself know.

All of this is to tell you what it's like to go home when your older relatives are all gone, when the only home you have ever known is no longer home. It's still where you grew up, but it's not the same in dislocated ways. It's something that I knew would happen, but knowing it's going to happen and living through the losses and living after the losses, is different.

For one thing, all the old people who I knew and loved are gone. The county is slowly dying on its feet and nobody seems to care. Bringing in industry would mean outsiders and foreigners, and that is change, which is anathema to these people. As a result, more die than are born, or move in.