It took a bolt of lightning to open the door on the hoard of memories that stood between him and his refuge.
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My husband and I have been empty-nesters for quite some time now since our son left for college in 2005. About three years ago I converted his room to my office, removing all the posters and other paraphernalia that were part of his boyhood, painting a soft color and adding my own decorative touches. My office is neat and organized and has a delicious sense of calm.
My husband wants his own room too. A place to display sports pictures and trophies; where he can watch his own TV that doesn’t have my very active DVR hooked up to it. He gets very frustrated when he tries to change channels and the DVR message bluntly tells him he can’t because I already have too many shows recording.
We do have an extra room and converting it to a man cave should have been fairly easy.
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We do have an extra room and converting it to a man cave should have been fairly easy. Except there were memories blocking the way. Boxes of memories that I couldn’t go through because grief still filled the room, more than four years after both my parents passed away. It was easier to avoid opening the door to clean anything out. Compounding the overwhelm, I have allowed myself to become a mini hoarder and have added to the stacks and boxes with my own personal stash of items I didn’t want to deal with.
Compounding the overwhelm, I have allowed myself to become a mini hoarder and have added to the stacks and boxes with my own personal stash of items I didn’t want to deal with.
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Then lightning struck. Literally. During an intense summer storm, lightning tore a hole in our chimney, skirted around the house and knocked out the electrical panel and all our appliances. We lived in a hotel for several weeks while we were having the house restored. One of the casualties of the damage was the TV. It turns on, but it has a big black line running horizontally across it.
It happens that the cable lines come into our home in the extra room. In order to get the power and the cable back on in the house, I had to open that door, enter the room and navigate around the piles and boxes to let the repairman do his job.
I was incredibly embarrassed by the mess. And then something caught my eye. In shoving all the boxes aside to get to the corner where the cable outlet was, a picture fell out of an album. It was my dad and me on a bicycle built for two. He had borrowed the bike from a friend so he could ride it with me. I was about eight or nine years old in the picture and I was instantly transported back in time remembering that day.
It was almost as if he reached through the years to give me a hug.
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It wasn’t long before the album was in my lap and I was pouring through the pictures. Me, dancing on my daddy’s feet, my mom had snapped that one in the living room. The park down the street where he taught me to fly a kite and where I fell out of a tree I climbed after he warned me not to. By the time he got me home and Mom bandaged the long scrape on my arm, he had forgotten about sending me to my room. Turning the pages brought smiles. To think I was terrified of opening the door to the room, much less to my memories and my soul, seemed silly now. I spent the next few hours looking at albums, the one in my lap and another next to me on the floor. I found a picture of my dad walking to his first day of school in Ohio, smoking a pipe when he was 15, and another one in his army uniform a few years later.
I did cry, but they were happy tears. What a release of all that pain and guilt now replaced by joy. It was almost as if he reached through the years to give me a hug. Especially when I found a card I had given him that he and Mom had saved. It was signed, Love, Baby Dot, the nickname Dad called me, short for Baby Daughter.
If the lightning had not ripped our chimney open on that stormy night, I might still be fighting my own fears and blocks behind that door.
I am grateful my husband has been very patient. The paint and carpet for the room are on order. Soon, the room will be in order too. One man cave coming soon.
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Photo:Flickr/Jos Dielis
Glad he got his man cave. I’ve had mine for years. OUr house is very old and all the memories of lives past are throughout our house, including two gallery walls on the open staircase and upstairs hallway. My wife has her family things in her sewing room, and my dad is well represented in my man cave. My mom also passed a lot of things to my wife which my wife cherishes almost more then her own mom’s.
That’s so nice Tom. I love the idea of memories throughout the house. It truly sounds like a family home!