Just Passing Through
Audrey Marie Studt Stewart

“This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.”
We sing that song in church, it only has three chords. I play it too fast, and we pass through quickly. I know this world is not my home, this land is not even my home. I call it mine, but that never lays quite right. Other women’s dreams rested on this land before mine did.  
Harriet’s table. To my children it means “the table we must not touch,” but to me it means my great-grandmother’s best friend. It’s bridge games, and crossword puzzles, faded rose perfume, and M&Ms.
My furniture is used, my clothes are second hand, and even my name is old. I like it that way, but my house is new. No one has ever lived in this house but us. We ordered it from a catalog, and it came on a truck. Maybe because it’s so new, I like my house but I don’t love it. I feel gratitude, but not affection.
The house I love is old. Old as a house, older before as a barn, and because it’s a log cabin, older yet for the trees. We roughly know its history, little stories, who made what. It has character and life. It’s our home, even if only for the summers.
There’s an art to sharing a house with four generations. A lot of it involves not messing with people’s special things. We have a lot of chairs, but we can’t get rid of a chair because we have a lot of bodies, and so any time someone says, “maybe we could let that chair go?” someone else says, “What!? That’s my favorite chair!”
I opened a strawberry shaped cookie jar a few years ago to find a note in my Grandmother’s hand that said, “Audrey likes this.” Apparently child me must have saved the never used cookie jar, and now that it’s labeled it may never go.
That’s how the little shelf is, hanging on the cupboard aside the kitchen sink. We hang the chainmail to clean the cast iron pans on it, but other than that it has two tiers of little ceramic trinkets. Nothing useful, and probably nothing cherished, just there.  
It’s not just things. It’s us too. We may just be passing through this world, but we’re doing it as an entity apart, separate, not necessarily reliant on our setting or circumstance. Which is why I hand dry the dishes.  My Grandmother always dried the dishes immediately after washing them. I’ve never minded to dry, but I once mentioned that it might be a more economical use of time to let them air dry and then put them away. She told me that once she had left them to dry and a bat had pooped on them in the night, so the whole batch had to be rewashed. Now I hand dry the dishes so a bat won’t poop on them, except all the bats are dead. Whitenose got them.  
Grandma’s gone too, she passed through.
Washing dishes with Grandpa, him washing, me drying, I asked him about the lilacs out the window.  It’s my favorite place, standing at the kitchen sink looking south out the window at the lilac tree. I’ve only been here once when the lilacs were blooming. Their scent, simultaneously intense and delicate, pervaded the kitchen through the open window, blending on the cool breeze with the smell of water, seaweed, and decay. It was only once, but in my mind I see them now when I look out the window. 
“What is the story behind the lilac bush?” I ask.
“Before my time.”
I can see it then, when I turn it around.  The lilac looking in the kitchen window at us washing dishes, instead of the other way around.  How many people, how many families has it seen through the window?  We’re just two more people passing through.

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Audrey Marie Studt Stewart lives in southeast Kentucky on a farm in the Daniel Boone National Forest, with her husband and two children. Her work is drawn out of her devotion to her family and intrinsic
connection with the land along the Cumberland river and surrounding mountains. She was
formerly a home birth midwife.

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