I’m housesick. There’s really no other way to describe it.
It’s true, what they say. You sometimes really can’t go home again. Last year, at just this time, they tore my house down.
It was kind of spooky, really. The house was born in June of 1930, belonged for fourteen years to the Browns and was bought by my grandmother in 1944. From then until 1996, it belonged to my Nanny, my mother and finally, briefly, to me. After extensive renovation the new owner rented it out until it’s death by bulldozer in June 2003. Now an office building covers the former Texaco on the corner, overlapping onto the former icecream parlour next door. What remains of my house is a parking lot. I’ll never hear Joni Mitchell quite the same again. “They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot…”
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t an easy realtionship. Parts of the house were haunted. I couldn’t spend time in the attic or basement without being forced to the stairs by a strong feeling of …unwantedness. Parts of the house loved me.
I can close my eyes and find the back porch. I sit on it, on a late Spring day and watch the sun set through a filter of birch leaves. Those tree’s came home in the trunk of my Dad’s '56 Dodge when I was six or seven. They’d topped the house twice over by the time they were brought down.
I can see the long line of icicles across the front eaves. When the new gutters went up, the icicles stopped forming and my mother heaved a huge sigh of relief. I know she always expected to look out one day and find me impaled as I rolled my snowman.
If I smell wet, sunbleached, grass, I can close my eyes and see me, Tracy and Mary running through the spray from our old black hose. We’d thread it through one of the patio benchs and brave the icy cold water. Mom had a method for keeping our time limited. I’d have to check the thermometer on the back porch and only if the red line was past the metal staple - 80 degrees - would we be allowed to set up the hose. To do it, we first had to disconnect it from the goldfish pond Dad had built over by the lilacs.
The dark red Christmas chrysthanthemums always bloomed closer to Halloween. I remember seeing them as I whirled past in my wild dance across the patio with a sparkler, a bit of wildness I repeated every year well into adulthood.
I remember sitting across the seat of the old turqouise rocker, with my ears still full of water and my hair full of chlorine after a day at the local pool. That chair sits now in my own living room. I’d like to take it home, but I can’t.
My room. For thirty six years, it was my room. I left it at twenty, but all my things stayed and during the last of Mom’s illness it became my room again. I slept once again in the bed that had held me for so long. I woke up to the same quality of light, warmed myself over the same hot air vent, ate at my own place from the same dishes. Going to my own house to spend time with my own family began to seem strange. It was as though I got back my childhood, even though my time was spent caring now for my mother.
The house had begun to die even before she did. The roof leaked terribly, the plumbing went, the furnace died. There were patches, tarps, buckets and heaters to contend with. Mom’s problems included agoraphobia, and visiter were an agony. Fixing the house would have to wait, but then she started to defer her taxes and the house would have to be sold.
Mom died in July 1995 and I finally found a buyer in October of 1996.
It was strange to finally own the house. When it first came into the family, my grandmother was newly divorcd, with three children. Mom was just thirteen. In due time, my uncles married and moved out. My Dad came as a boarder and stayed when he fell in love with Mom. Nanny passed away when I was thirteen, and then the house was Mom’s, willed directly to her.
It hurt to sell it, but I couldn’t have lived there. In a way I was afraid of it. My family was afraid of it. Even our dog was afraid of it. It was too eerie to be there alone, but in that last year I often was. I had to pack things up, sort out fifty-two years worth of us. The odd feeling in the attic and basement were still there and I wondered if it would stay when we’d finally gone. I wondered if it was mad because we let it go.
Now, I want it back. I want to slide down the tiled hall and sit on the back steps and listen to the birchs rustle.
But I can’t go home again. And I’m housesick.