I am from...

I am from bungalo, connected rooms and pressure cooker.
I am from the double lot, all grassy next door.
I am from the lilacs and peonies.
The stately, solid blue spruce whose long gone limbs I remember as if they were my own. And whose branches protected my sisters bird’s nest science project-I chose to freeze and fry earthworms.
I'm from eating dirty tomatoes and asking for salt afterward
and now I lay me down to sleep.
I’m from summer bar b ques.
I'm from Downers Grove and the Impetuous Irish and peanut butter balls.
From my Mom losing her underwear as she walked across a busy street in Chicago because she was pregnant and her undies slid below her belly. She simply walked out of them and kept going. From scattered boxes and loving, cherished scrapbooks.

Now the land I grew up on has become a paved parking lot. The paver did leave the large, stately, monolith of life, the blue spruce tree, now surrounded by gray asphalt. What night have become of the house if it were still standing? Why did our parish priest, who bought this house, tell my widowed mother that he was going to use the house as a youth house? Why did he lie to her, and therefore to my sister and I? How do we forgive him? My sister and I never had a chance to go through the house and clear out our childhood connections, filaments of warmth, love, safety, still connected as the bulldozer ravaged our home. Perhaps a loving family, as ours was, would live there now, basking in the laughter on the ceiling and the memories on the kitchen linoleum.