It is not the house I grew up in. I tell the story as, "Yes, I went off to college, and while I was gone, the family moved." My parents married when they were babies, and we had lived in four different homes before they finally got to build and settle into the home that was what they really wanted, designed to fit on a slice of land in the country. They were, I realize with a bit of a shock, about the same age my grown children are right now. The house they built is now five decades on the planet.
I didn't grow up in this house, but my children did. It was where my daughter led countless cousin parades through the kitchen and around the living room, where my son and his cousins played on an ancient Flash Gordon pinball machine. I played with my nieces and nephews in that living room. Eventually another generation of small children also played there; there was always a collection of books and toys for the littles. The barn held the old cars, the restored 1914 fire engine, the rehabilitated roto-tiller, the riding mowers. There was a garden, a semi-successful blueberry patch (well, the deer enjoyed it, anyway).
In college, this was where I brought friends to visit and eat Thanksgiving dinner and, at least once, sleep over outside on a large patch of comfy moss. When my first job ended, this house was my home for the year it took to find steady employment again. The house held a collection of oddities-- an old family heirloom grandfather clock, a large ship model, a massive collection of big band and jazz records, large numbers of my father's self-designed bookshelves.
All of those items have been emptied out, dispersed to family or sold in auction. There are still two dressers left that I have to pick up. My grandfather bought them for my parents at a yard sale almost seventy years ago for some ridiculous price, like five dollars, with the understanding that they could replace them with something better when they were able. They never did.
It's hard to see the place empty, harder than I thought it would be. A place is just a large physical object, and it gets most of its character from the people who are there, and when the people aren't there, the place isn't the same. When you go back to your old college without your old classmates there, it's just different, even unnerving, like sitting your foot down and unexpectedly finding no step beneath it.
It's one of those challenges they don't tell you about in teacher school-- every year, your school, your classroom, is a new and different place. And on the flip side, if you stay long enough, you become a familiar part of the building, a thing former students can take familiar comfort from when everything else has changed. But for the teacher, every year the school morphs slowly into some other place entirely, similar physical settings repeatedly recast with new humans to give them life and breath.
The house is currently empty, hollowed out, not actually anyone's home, for much of my family a sort of phantom limb. It looks like it will sell, that it will become a whole other place for a whole other family, and that is how houses work. The house I'm typing this in, my home, was once someone else's home, only the faintest trace of those folks here. That is how houses work.
We like to think of the large physical pieces of this world as comfortably permanent, and we are periodically reminded that they are not, and that the living people who animate them will come and go and change and grow. I don't want my daughter to be dressed up and commanding her brother and the rest of the tiny troops to line up-- I don't want that to be forever, but I feel a tinge of loss that the physical location of those parades will be scrubbed of their imprint. It's fine. That's what memory is for-- to hold onto the threads and breath of the past. Physical objects, places-- they can promise to hold the imprint of events and people, but their grip never turns out to be as tight as we imagine it will be.
The road back to the house used to be dirt; in wet seasons, there would be three ruts, the middle one to be used by traffic in either direction. Pray you didn't meet one of the neighbors headed the other way. In winter the road would freeze, and if you couldn't quite make it to the top of the hill, you'd have to back out, head craned back over your shouldre, trying not to end up in the ditch. In my '79 Opel I perfected a mid-hill 180 spin. Over the years that road got better, and just a year or two ago the township paved it. So soon I won't be needing to drive back that twisty, treacherous dirt road anymore, but then, that road doesn't exist any more.
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