Tatevik’s Reviews > If Morning Ever Comes > Status Update

If he remembered it only as it looked right now, would he miss it as much? He couldn't tell.
He stood there for maybe five minutes, but he couldn't make the house register on his mind at all. It might be any other house on the block; it might be anyone's.

When he was far away from home, and picturing what it looked like, this wasn't the way he saw it at all. He saw it as it had been when he was small - a giant of a place, with children playing on the sunlit lawn and yellow flowers growing in two straight lines along the walk. Now, as he looked at the house, he tried to make the real picture stay in his memory.

When he was across the street from his house he turned and looked back at it. It sat silently in the twilight, with the bay windows lit yellow by the lamps inside and the irregular little stained-glass and rose windows glowing here and there against the vague white clapboards.

I like kids. Joanne takes too good care of just the one. She needs a whole group of them. She's always saying how Carol's got to be secure-feeling, got to have no wonders about being loved or not. But this way she just makes Carol nervous - follows her around reading psychology books. Wants to know what her nightmares are about. I say let her alone - kids grow up all right.

Sometimes whole weeks would be in blocks. Someone could say, 'What's this week been like?' and right off the bat you could say, 'Oh, lousy. My father won't let me have the car because he caught me scratching off in front of Stacy's café the other day. Or it would be a great week, for another reason just that clear-cut. It's not that way any more.”

"Oh, well, what I mean is, the days seem to come in pieces now. They used to be in blocks - all one solid color to them.

Inside, there was the mossy brown smell that he had been raised with, that seemed to be part and parcel of the house and was a wonderful smell if you were glad to be home and an unbearable smell if you were not. And mingled with it were the more temporary, tangible smells - bacon, coffee, hot radiators, newly ironed dresses, bath powder.