I’ve been in a place of deep remembrance this last week and am revisiting some stories about my parents. I love remembering, and I love how my grief has softened over the years but still comes for a visit every now and again. It’s like a thread connecting us that can never be broken.
Here’s a sweet story that came up, it’s one of my favorites. I’d love it if you’d share a story or a picture in the comments about who you’re remembering. —- Back in 2018 I went on something of a pilgrimage to the places where my parents had met and had me. This journey was part of my path to healing the grief of having lost them back to back in 2017, and as it turns out, a critical lesson in trusting my intuition.
As I was booking my accommodations for the trip, I kept seeing the same house pop up in my recommendations. I love old houses, so it WAS intriguing, but it didn’t really meet any of my needs outside of a great freakin price tag. I was traveling a lot for work at the time and had come to prefer renting a full unit so I could come and go as I pleased without worry of bothering anyone, so I kept passing the listing over.
But this house, it just kept coming up.
It was old and kinda cool and in the right neighborhood but it was like, nothin special. It seemed a little dingy and some of the reviews even commented on the overall dustiness of the space. There were no absolutely GLOWING reviews, but no absolutely awful reviews either.
I scoured the listings and found tons of otherwise perfect spots, but for some reason I kept going back to this one “blah” listing. It wanted me to stay there, that’s the only explanation. So I listened to this voice; this inner knowing, this message from my guides or whatever it was, and I booked it. I still had several weeks before my trip and figured I could change it if I just didn’t feel right as the trip got closer, no biggie.
Fast forward to May in Springfield, Missouri. I arrived pretty late so I went straight to bed and in the morning I went down to the kitchen for some coffee. This alone felt weird because I wasn’t used to staying in places with communal kitchens. What do I do here? Do I just make myself at home? Do I ask for help? I felt genuinely uncomfortable about the whole deal. Anyway, the woman who owned the house greeted me and gave me the full rundown of the property and we started chatting over coffee and a toke. She asked me why I was in town and I told her the short version; that I was there to learn about the place where my parents met, fell in love and had me.
That wasn’t enough for her. She was weirdly persistent in finding out what I planned to see and where I planned to go while I was in town. This was a little awkward because a) I didn’t actually have much of a plan, and b) the place I most wanted to find was RIDICULOUSLY unlikely to be found.
I wanted to find the house where my parents were married and the ONLY thing I knew about it was that my parents lived next door to a band and that band’s shared house is where they were married. I didn’t know the neighborhood, I didn’t know the name of the person whose house it was, I literally only knew that it belonged to a band that my dad knew and occasionally played music with, AND I knew what it looked like from inside the front main room from my parents wedding photo. That’s it. There was no way I was really gonna find this house.
Anyhow, she persisted, and I told her my ridiculous desire and here is where I found out why I’d been drawn to this house.
She said, “Oh, I have lots of friends in music! What’s the name of the band”. I tell her, and I kid you not she says “I know them! In fact, I think they are recording some stuff today, I’ll take you to their studio.”
No shit.
She took me to the studio where I met an entire group of people who knew my parents when they met and married in 1975. They remembered when I was a babe in my mom’s belly. They told me stories of wild trips back and forth to Kansas City for gigs and painted a picture of the world I was welcomed into. I was completely and utterly dumbfounded.
One of them had just finished a solo album entirely about Springfield, this town I was born in but left when I was just a little one. He gave me a copy and I got to drive around listening to songs about my original hometown; places I’d never known, written and sung by someone with a very similar lived experience as my parents. It was wild and more than I could have asked for.
I never found the house on that trip. The band guys didn’t own it and it was a time filled with more debauchery than their memory could hold so no one remembered the address; but I got the gift of knowing my parents' story, which is really what I was looking for anyhow. Beyond that, I got a clear message that my trip was being guided by something other than myself, and my ability to trust that knowledge has brought me closer to them and my vast ancestral support system.
P.S. - I did eventually find the house on a different trip back. I found the address on my parents’ marriage certificate. It’s a parking lot now.
Blog Written by Summer Goon
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