a vicious looking hat-pin into a bouncy little straw hat. "Aunt Grace, you know perfectly well" Chiri began. "I've made all the arrangements," Aunt Grace insisted. "The house is empty now, has been for weeks. They're going to tear it down." Her voice quavered a little but she resolutely patted the aluminum-toned bun of her hair and went on. "I called the real estate company who owns the property now and explained who I am. I asked if I could go through the old place. They sent me a key." She rummaged through her patent-leather handbag for a moment, and then triumphantly held up a tagged key on a chain. As they drove up in front of the house, Chiri asked, "Do you want me to come in with you?" Her voice betrayed that she really didn't want to. "No," Aunt Grace opened the car door and bounced out. "You go do your shopping. I'll still be here when you get through." "I might be quite awhile. Sure you'll be all right?" "I'm sure. Got lots of memories to keep me company. Go on, now." Aunt Grace was waiting on the front porch when Chiri returned. Her pert little hat was off on one side of her head, and there was a smudge of dust on her wrinkled cheek. Chiri felt a twinge of guilt for leaving her there for so long. The old woman looked so tired. Her face was wan as she sank gratefully onto the comfort of the upholstered car seat. Her glossy patent leather shoes were dusty. She kicked them off at once. Chiri waited until they had moved out into the hemoglobulous stream of traffic, then asked softly, "How was it, Aunt Grace?" Grace glanced at her quickly, sideways, like an apprehensive little old bird. "The house? Terribly empty. I wish I could have gone back before it became so empty." "Maybe you shouldn't have gone at all." "I'm glad I did. It's best. Some things you just have to get out of your system, even if it's painful." Grace mused quietly for a minute, her usual nervous flittering hands quiet in her lap. She hunched down a little in the seat, and said softly, "The biggest shock was the kitchen. Some idiot cut it in half, right smack down the middle. They made a new room out of one end of it." Chiri could understand that the old kitchen was too big by modern standards. Couples didn't have eleven children and all their husbands and wives and grandchildren to feed, not any more. "They've got a beat-up old gas range still in there," Grace said. "Right in the spot where Mama's stove used to be." Why did that sound like sacrilege? Wasn't it to be expected, just another point of progress, the house trying to change with the times? Even houses, apparently, had caught the youth mania, and tried to hide their age. "They cemented the cellar and put a gas furnace in down there," Grace went on tonelessly. "That would be a big improvement," Chiri remarked sourly as she maneuvered the car around a corner. "Can't store root vegetables right in a cement cellar," Grace sniffed. "Aunt Grace, NOBODY keeps vegetables that way any more." "Well they should. Best way there is." It was no use arguing, no use talking to Aunt Grace about freezers and the corner super market. She used these things, but she was never converted completely to them. After a minute, Chiri ventured hesitantly, "The mulberry tree?" "Gone," Grace said. She leaned back against the car seat with a sigh, and the little hat came forward a bit over one eye. "Not even a stump left." Chiri thought about that in silence for awhile. She didn't know of any other mulberry trees and wondered if even mulberries had gone out of style, to be forgotten and replaced by modern varieties of berries. "Stairs have been carpeted," grace wound down the window on her side of the car to get a breath of fresh air, and the breeze lifted a few stray wisps of her iron hair. "Lots quieter that way, I suppose." "Yes," Chiri agreed. The noisy clacking of a little girl's shoes would be muted by carpet. "Whole place has been cut up into apartments," Grace closed her eyes. "Couldnt hardly recognize a thing upstairs. Bathrooms in all the littlest rooms, things like that. But the front parlor looked lots the same. Empty, but lots the same.' "I was afraid you'd be disappointed, Aunt Grace. I still don't know why you thought you had to go back there." "I guess I thought ghosts would take me through the rooms with them," Grace said after a moment. "Did they?" Chiri held her breath a little. Yes, she thought. I would have expected ghosts, too. 18 "No," Grace sighed. "There wer en't any ghosfs. And while I wa wandering around in there in tha creaky old place, I realized that with out people who matter living ir it, it's only a decayed old house.' "I'm not sure what you mean.' Chiri almost went through a rec light, and stopped the car with c jerk. Grace didn't notice. "Well, it's people, and love, tha turn a house into a home," Grace said with impatient tenderness "Without that, even that house was only a gray rock box of memories and memories exist in the mind, not in the house." They were beginning to get out of the heavy traffic, and Chiri relaxed a little. "I thought you dreaded it being torn down," she said. "I did," Grace admitted. "It was like I was afraid the wreckers were going to destroy my last contact with Papa and Mama and the others who are gone now. You didn't feel it, did you?" "Yes I did, but I remembered so many sad things. The sicknesses, the deaths, and always hanging over everything the terrible poverty." "There were sad things," Grace nodded a little. "There always is, in life. But for me it was the love tha' hung over everything. The love that Papa and Mama left for us, and us for them. I guess I tried to go back to yesterday for a little while, to find them. In my own way I guess I wanted to pay them a final tribute, to see if I couldn't find them again. I miss them all so much. I just wanted to say a last goodbye." The words were low. Grace wasn't often given to sentiment. Chiri hesitated, then whispered, "And did you find them?" "No. They weren't there." Tears were hanging on Grace's eyelashes, and Chiri remembered another time when those lashes dripped, but somehow she felt that these weren't the same kind of tears the others had been. Aunt Grace got a tissue out of the glove compartment and blew her nose loudly. "They left the house when we did," she said. "Of course they did. I should have known they would. What would there be for them there, unless we were there too? No more than I found, without them." Chiri turned into her own driveway, and drove on into the open garage at the back of the house. For a few nostalgic moments before they would be besieged by the children, she and Aunt Grace sat together in the semi-darkness of the garage, in understanding quiet. Grace laid her withery hand over Chiri's, and it was light and cool to touch. "I guess I had to learn it was never the house. You know, the only real important things in this world are people, not places or things. It was my people who made that house seem alive, and who made my memories. They were important, not the house. And no matter what happens to the house, I'll always have my memories." The bulldozers came. The walls of the old gray house bowed from the impact and then tumbled to progress. A heap of gray stone marked where it had once stood, and then even the stones were gone. The traces of Chiri's childhood that had appeared to cling to the house were erased, obliterated by the scuffling feet of time. She wasn't glad to see the house go, but she didn't grieve, either. She didn't grieve because now she too knew she would never have to say goodbye. TO MY HUSBAND Don't put me in a box and try to keep me there, or I'll leak like luke-warm ice cream oozing out on all sides, And spread myself too thin to be of use to anyone, or I will become solidified like old brown sugar hard and dried. And when you peel the sides away I'll still be there square. BETTY BRAND