Full Service Filling Station
I try to think why this picture speaks to me. Why it calls to be made. I drive past the old abandoned gas station at least once each week. Sometimes the light is soft, shining on the white concrete. It feels like a memory that I can’t quite recall, like a word on the tip of your tongue. There are chains and ropes and pieces of fence around the perimeter warning trespassers to stay out, but today the ropes hang slack. I decide it’s okay to stand on the border and take this picture.
Once I am at home, staring at the image on the screen, the memory surfaces. This gas station reminds me of the times, when I was little, when our family would pull over to an old country store, one that sold both gas and food. Dad would come out with a small paper sack filled with a loaf of Wonder Bread and freshly sliced bologna and sodas. Mom would make sandwiches, bread and meat smashed together. Soda burps. Salty chips if we were lucky. Little legs extended over bench seats with nary a seat belt in sight.
I think this is what love looks like. And I’m lucky both my parents said those words often. I love you.
I worry that I’ve failed my children, that in trying to do my best, I’ve somehow let them down or made things harder for them. But I never fail to tell them I love you and I hope those words, and the actions that accompany them, are enough to make it all right.
Blessed are the parents whose final words on leaving—the house, the car, the least consequential phone call—are always “I love you.” They will leave behind children who are lost and still found, broken and, somehow, still whole. —Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations