Last Train Out with Beth Brown Ables: Down to the Studs

]Mid-August last year, two men showed up and tore our kitchen apart. “Taking it down to the studs,” they called it. “Demo Day! Demo Day!” our kids chanted. After 13 years in this house, it was finally time to renovate: I was getting the kitchen I’d always dreamed of.

I’ve seen enough HGTV to know what demolition would look like — even pictured myself in a hard hat, sledgehammer in hand, bashing out one of our well-worn cabinets, ripping out the barely functioning secondhand dishwasher. Be gone! The midcentury kitchen had served our family well for four generations now: it was tired, it was time.

I forgot to tell my heart that, though. As the workers tore into the walls, the ceiling, the layers of linoleum, I hid in the bedroom, mystified by the tears wetting my face, the sobs shaking my body. This was a happy day, a dream come true! What on earth was wrong with me?

Home is where the heart is, they say. I forgot that the heart is also in the home.

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Those weren’t just walls the workers stripped out; they were soaked with years of conversation, prayer, memory. This was where my husband would visit his grandparents after school when he was little, sitting at the table to finish his homework. It’s the same space where our own kids ate their first bites of food. It’s where we hosted community groups, Thanksgivings, birthday parties, sad dinners of leftovers, potlucks with dozens of friends, breakfasts of cold cereal and berries past their prime. The daily drudgery, the gorgeous tedium that makes up a life.

I cried when they ripped out our kitchen because it ripped out what was: the under-cabinet lights my dad spent an entire day and several trips to Home Depot installing, the garbage disposal he added (which was way too powerful and rocketed dirty water into the faces of unsuspecting dish washers), the light switch taped over from where he took out an overhead light and never got around to replacing it. Dad was all over that room, and now it was gone, just like he’s gone. Two years now. Demo day was visceral — a rending, a mourning. Grief touches grief taps into that larger well of hurt.

For all of us, home feels different these days. Hurricane Helene clawed her way up the ribcage of the South, chewing up old oak trees, flooding valley towns, clogging rivers and lakes with splintered lumber, ragged insulation, shattered windows: homes.

The name Helene means “shining light,” a horrible irony, when so many are without, literally and figuratively powerless. Our street alone lost 23 trees, sturdy giants: the air here smelled like fresh lumber and looked like a war zone. We lost power for nine days, and when there was a sliver of cell signal, my phone filled with images of flood waters, mud-caked lives, the devastation of Western North Carolina. Instead of watching the news, we were the news. One story followed a woman from Swannanoa re-entering her flood-ravaged home: “I feel like this is a movie,” her voice trailing off, “it’s surreal to see all of your things, covered in mud and useless.”

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When our kitchen was torn up, an echo-y shell of what it was, my father-in-law stopped by to see the progress. “I remember this floor,” he said, toeing the dark linoleum, hidden for decades. He smiled at the memories. When so much is torn away, raw and exposed, the light gets in, the truth is revealed. The news shows flood waters, but maybe the shining light is in the stories of communities feeding one another, the donations, the outpouring, the neighborhood text threads checking on each other.

It took two days to tear out our kitchen and dining room, but a good part of a year to build it back. Creating something stronger and better takes time and patience and steely resolve.

Home is where the heart is, they say. Our hearts are in our homes, in our communities, in our favorite places. Before we wrap ourselves back up in the familiar comforts of power and Internet, of insulated walls and intact roofs, remember this vulnerable time. Remember when we were so briefly ripped down to the studs and sinews, where we shared what we had, where we stood in the middle of our ravaged streets and held each other close. Remember this also: there are those close by that will need us for years to come.

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Home is where our hearts are. In the walls heavy with prayer, in the rooms we find safety within. Home is in the pictures, the junk drawers, dirty towels, the crumbs on the counter. It’s in the lumber-smelling air, the outstretched hand, the we’re-not-going-anywhere resolve. A long road ahead, together.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Last Train Out with Beth Brown Ables: Down to the Studs

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