They are stripping the room bare while the girl still breathes and stands within it. This is how we do it for the dead. We take down the bed, we fold the linens, we carry off the small kept things, and then the room forgets there was ever a body in it. But she is not dead. She is only leaving.
I do not understand leaving. A man is born in a house and he dies in it, and between those two mornings he does not go anywhere the ox cannot pull him. Yet here the boxes are stacked to the door, and every one holds warmth: cloth, wool, a lamp, a chest of little treasures a family would guard against a hard winter.
They give it all to her and send her out. In my village a girl left the house only for a husband or a grave.
The mother touches the empty wall where the bed stood. She does not weep loud. She presses her hand flat on the plaster as if to feel whether it is still warm. I know that touch. It is how you touch a thing you will not have again.
I thought them fools for pulling a living room to pieces. Now I see. The child was never the room's. The room was only lent to her, as breath is lent, as the good Lord lends us all we love and calls it back in His hour. They are not burying her. They are learning, early and on purpose, the grief the rest of us are ambushed by.
She will build her own walls now.
And one day some child will strip them bare.