After closing the deal to buy their first house, and before moving in, my parents brought champagne and cake to their new address. They wanted to celebrate with the family that would be moving out. This was a mistake.
My brother was two; neither I nor my sister was yet born. Eventually, as a few black and white pictures confirm, we would all sit at the top of what my parents called “the climbing rock,” a boulder in the front yard around which ran a half-circle driveway.
One of the pictures shows me next to my brother on what must have been, given the hats, a birthday. The driveway was gravel, I think.
For my parents, this new home meant promise. For the family moving out it meant something else. Did they not wish to move? Were they moving willingly but from a place their kids loved? Would the sound of gravel soon haunt them by its absence? I do not know the generalities let alone the particulars. But my parents were celebrating, the other family grieving.
I never climbed the climbing rock. Or so I presume. Lifted up for a picture, yes, but we moved again before it sank into memory as it would have had I been given time to conquer it on my own.