Coming Home Brings Memories Again

We recently returned home from a lengthy trip. We thought about Leif every day while we were gone, but when I'm traveling, I don't miss him so much. I think that's because when I'm out of our home environment, I don't EXPECT him to be there, so it's "all right." When I come home, I'm reminded of all the things he did, all the things in our home that we have because of him, all his visits, the places he went.

Yesterday I had to go to an appointment near the area in Tampa where he lived. I passed by the CVS I'd been to with him, the VA hospital I took him to, the university he attended. I had a momentary urge to drive by his apartment, realizing, though, how silly that was. There is nothing of him or anything of his there. The oddest moment came when I had to make a U-turn on a busy street and a young man on a yellow Suzuki crotch rocket pulled up right behind me. I almost did a double take. I couldn't help but wonder whether it was Leif's stolen bike.

Not so long ago I was in Michael's crafts store and as I walked to the bead isle to find some things for Peter, I passed the shelves full of plastic model kits. I had to take a picture, because if I had ever taken Leif to a Michael's as a child, this would have been his favorite place. He LOVED building models. Car models. Airplane models. Ship models. He started doing it very young, when he was quite capable of figuring out how they went together, but not as good at using the glue so it didn't show. He would get so upset with himself for making a mess of the glue.

On the drive home from the appointment, I kept thinking about how I rarely write on this blog any more. It's because I don't want to keep saying the same things . . . though here I go doing it . . . and I realized there will never be any new memories of Leif to recount, though perhaps I'll be lucky enough to discover something someday that will trigger one I haven't already written about. I'll never have any new photos of him to post, unless someone else who knew him ever sends me some I haven't seen.

It wasn't as hard coming home this time because I had my sister Lannay here to distract me. My usual melancholy for Leif didn't arrive until after she left and I started seeing things like the motorcycle rider and thinking of Leif when I couldn't sleep at night.

There will always be things to remind me of him wherever I go, but home is where I miss him most.

Leif and the Popsicle Stick Western Town - Sachsen bei Ansbach, Germany - February 1980 - Age 5

In an earlier post I said I wished I had a photo of the Western town that Leif and I built out of popsicle sticks when he was small, and I found one. It was a kit that he got for his fifth birthday on January 28, 1980. It was a hard project for a boy only five years old and he couldn't have done it alone, but we had a great time constructing it together. The kit consisted of thin cardboard frames for the buildings. We had to cut them out and fold and glue them into shape, then cut the popsicle sticks and other wood pieces to fit in place and glue them on. It turned out pretty nice. He had fun playing with it. We moved it around with us for years, boxed up with other toys he had outgrown but wanted to keep. At some point, we decided to let it go but the memories of the fun we had with it linger on.

Leif and his brother always liked to make things, from plastic models of airplanes, ships, tanks and cars to things they thought up and constructed from things they found or scrounged up around the house and neighborhood. They were creative boys with a lot of ideas. Often, their ideas were more complex and difficult to create than their abilities would allow and they would get frustrated, particularly Leif. They both learned to live with that, though, and Leif had quite a collection of plastic models he had made from as far back as about third grade, maybe earlier, that were still packed up with his toys when he was thirty years old. We had (or at least I had) ideas of passing them on to his kids someday, so I kept them long after he had left home.

When we moved to Florida in 2005, none of us had a place to store them any more and Leif parted with the old models and gave his GI Joes and Japanese robot toys to his nephew, Marcus.

I will always remember the fun I had making things with my boys.
----------------------------

This photos was taken in our kitchen in the village of Sachsen bei Ansbach in Germany, in February 1980. Leif was five years old.