The House when we’re gone.
The house doesn’t go still when we leave.
Even when we’re not in it, it doesn’t feel empty.
It’s never really quiet here.
On the days we’re gone, someone else moves through it—
my mom, sometimes my dad, the baby passed from one set of arms to another.
The dogs circling, settling, getting up again as if they’ve remembered something.
The house doesn’t empty out.
It just shifts.
There’s a kind of continuity to it.
Things don’t stop when we leave.
They just keep going in a slightly different key.
Something in the fridge already halfway to becoming dinner.
A jar in the back that’s been there long enough to be relied on.
The starter on the counter, somewhere between neglected and alive.
It’s not magic.
It’s what happens when something is tended to often enough that it learns the rhythm.
The house keeps it.
And then, in a way I don’t fully understand, it keeps us.
It shows up in small ways.
Things returning to where they belong without being told.
The feeling that something has been maintained, even if you weren’t the one doing it.
Not perfectly. Not all at once.
But steadily.
It never really empties out.
It just changes hands.