Thistles and houses

And so it was strange, then, how, on our very first walk after, the house started to come down. She had died only the night before and had walked past that house with us the morning before that. There was a purple flower, thistly and tall, she had stopped to smell on our last walk together, just next door to the house that was now, before our very eyes, being demolished. I had been inside that house, only once, but even so . . . it was a house filled with memories. Soaked into its plaster and paint, its tiles; its very beams had absorbed and supported a family’s history there together. And now, their history--and mine and yours and hers (does she have a history still, being no longer alive to carry it?)--flies around in the air, dust motes shimmering, sparkling, scattering, settling in new configurations upon new surfaces.