The house with the purple awnings

September 9th, 2011 § 10 comments

I drove by it thrice today: the little house with the purple awnings.

It’s on the street near my children’s school… within walking distance, in fact. It almost always has a For Rent sign out front and seems perennially in a state of slight disrepair.

Barbara used to pass the house and say, “Paige, I could rent that house. And then you and your brothers could stay with me and I could walk you to school in the morning.”

We knew she wasn’t going to rent it, but the idea of having her so close was so appealing to us all.

“Whenever the boys are giving you trouble you can just walk over here,” she’d say to Paige. “We could have sleepovers.”

Grandma’s little cottage we sometimes called it.

But then Grandma died in a car crash— almost exactly two years ago. When that happened, our dreams of seeing her often and Paige’s fantasy of having her in the little cottage died too.

And so, today — and every day when I pass the house with the purple awnings– I think of her. And miss her. And all of the memories we could be making in the little house with the purple awnings right now.

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