This was the driveway my bachelor
uncle would walk down from the chicken house, whistling “Beautiful Dreamer,”
the loveliest thing he did.
This was the stoop, surrounded by
boxwood, where Granny sat while I pretended to walk to school, down the flagstone path and back. It’s a plain white memory,
indelible among countless others, for no good reason.
This was
the house I imagined all novels taking place in. The farm kitchen in the Good
Earth was here, with the haunted stairway in The Amityville Horror. Any
gracious living room was this one, steeped in the smell of wood smoke, each
conversation paced by the alto ticking of the grandfather clock.
This was
the screen porch where I was in love with someone I shouldn’t have been, and,
years later, where the baby, four months old, made Dad laugh by laughing for
the first time, on Father’s Day.
This was
the sloping kitchen floor. Any water spilled from the sink would collect in the
hall across the room. This was the cold closet, the pantry, where Mr. Van
Sickle, a 19th century owner and short man, fell into the pickle
barrel during a party and drowned.
Over there
was the door to the basement stairs, which would pop open loudly for no reason
when I reached the second floor. Yikes.
This was
the basement that smelled like it was dug in 1750, which it was. That old moldy
haunted fieldstone smell was part of the flavor of our sugar cookies. The bomb
shelter doubled as a wine cellar, built in the missile crisis.
This was my
room, up three steps from the hall, and the window where I’d stare at my
reflection as I wrote, and the guest room, where I stayed when it was Granny’s
house, where she told me I’d always have a place to come to.
This was the back yard where my high
school sweetheart made his family’s little whistle, even after college, the
back yard haunted by that happy decade of dark visits.
And the willow tree near where the dog
is buried, in my ballerina blanket from a decade before she died.
And across
the field, the spring, where we dammed a bit and made a pool, where the frogs
would precipitate out, more and more the longer I’d sit quietly, and the
weeping cherry in memory of Granny, where the robin made a nest my junior year
in high school, with fledglings that distracted me so well from Western Civilization.
I have to
travel to get to nature now. My folks sold the house and the new owner, despite
saying he loved it, tore off the oldest half, let it stand for a year with the
hall hanging out, then tore it all down, until all that was left was a very
high mound of dirt and junk, and then, a year later, a larger, new, historyless
house.