I'm borrowing from Gandalf on that one, but it truly has been almost a year since I posted on this blog, though what a year it has been, filled with glorious triumphs and a fair number of pains as well. The words have been building up in my chest for some time now, rattling around in their cage, screaming for me to put them to paper (digitally, or otherwise).
Speaking with an amazingly talented new friend and peer (check out her work here: http://kimmith709.wordpress.com), we fell into the topic of what it would be like if we could speak with inanimate objects. Specifically, we wondered what we would discuss with a house if it were capable of thought and communication. We asked questions both insightful and playful, nostalgic and melancholy. "Do you get cold in the winter?" "Where do you keep the things I have lost over the years?" "Do the other houses treat you well?" "Where are you hurting?"
Perhaps the years of reading Calvin and Hobbes, or more recently Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" collection (specifically, Volume Eight, titled "The Wake.") have led me to start shifting my own perspective when viewing the world. One of the stories in "The Wake" involves a dreaming city, with individuals slipping between the cracks of the city's dream, lost for years until they find their way home. The piece is a poignant work against a backdrop of masterful storytelling.
When I asked Kimmith what she would want to talk about with her house, I considered the topic playfully, smiling with her over the idea of a home as a storyteller of lives across the generations, akin to the bards and skalds of the ancient Celts and Norsemen. Something troubled me about the question though, some nagging proto-concept swirling through the atmosphere of my perception, lurking in the shadows of my smile until I got home from work and found myself walking through the halls of my family home, remembering the years which have passed since I was a child visiting my grandparents in this very same home.
Perhaps a house is a living thing, becoming as integral to our lives as a member of our own family. Parents, siblings, children, always remembered along with the family home. Individuals move through its body like blood cells traveling the arterial paths of a slumbering giant. Memories and emotions seep into the walls, recalled at the touch of a hand, or the sight of an imperfection caused by ornamentation or accident.
I love the house my family lives in. We have lived in this house for fifty years, and it is the one constant place I have felt safe in all my years. I know every creak in the floorboards, every nail-scarred pockmark in the walls. I know every apple tree in the yard, where the wasps and bees make their nests in the summer...one August not so long ago, I spent every night for two weeks dueling bell hornets that infiltrated my room from their nest outside my window, drawn by the light in my room. Many fell before me, be certain of that!
My grandparents bought this house when it was first built in the 1960s. It sits atop a small hill, between the forking paths of a road running from one end of our tiny community to another. The first house in the line of homes leading into newer parts of the community, it has the honor of being the closest house to a not-insignificant lake on the other side of the road.
When the seasons change, flocks of geese and ducks will pause in their journeys and take respite upon the lake beside my family's house, preening their feathers and feeding as they glide along its surface. As a boy, I often chased them from the lake's shores, trying with all my power to pet the geese. Once (and to my continued shame, I admit), I threw a soft apple,-fallen from one of my grandfather's trees-into the flock, catching the goose atop its head. Years later, I watched a flock of ducks and geese leave one of their injured members behind (able to swim and catch food, though enough feathers had fallen off of the wing that I could see spokes of bone exposed). One duck remained with its companion, standing guard while it slept, helping it to groom itself, and offering support as they swam together during the day.
My home has watched the turning of seasons and years for half a century now, from behind a veil of trees my grandfather planted in his years. Apple trees mostly-he'd collect their fruit every summer-though a few chestnut trees can be found along the hilltop at the edge of the yard closest to the forking road. One spring visit, with his help and encouragement, I planted my own yearling, taking extra care for the rest of the visit (and all subsequent visits from the age of eight to ten) to make sure my tree grew strong, with just enough water and sunlight.
In the backyard, a wall of trees fences the back slope off from our yard, veiling them in shadows. Here is where collected brush and fallen branches are set aside to be broken down for firewood in the winter. At times, deer or other creatures will travel through this last vestige of wilderness, feeding on the fallen apples and berries from our bushes. As a child, I considered the furthest corner of that shadowed area an ominous land, as intimidating for my bloated imagination as the entrance to a dragon's cave. Only when I came to bury a pet on the property (two cats, Moose and Suzie) did I brave the borders long enough to pay my respects. The wooden cross I fastened with a small length of rope stood for three years after I buried Suzie beside Moose, serving as a marker for me to find their resting place.
The house itself is humble yet dignified, with only a single floor and an unfinished basement, holding small rooms designed for a family of no more than four. Portraits of men and women long since passed adorn the walls, with an 18th century map of Colonial America dominating one wall in the living room. A sealed fireplace serves as the spine of the room, with the bricks of the chimney rising past the ceiling. Photos and antiques serve as furnishings for the mantle and just about every other flat surface in the room. This is the heart of the house, and for my grandparents and parents, has been and continues to be the location for many of their activities. At night, Jeopardy or Frasier plays on the television, the voices of the actors funneling through the main hall of the house, straight to my room at the rear.
My room is plainly ornamented, with a Geisha painting from the 19th century, and a copy J.R.R. Tolkien's "All That Is Gold" hanging on the walls. Temperatures are difficult to manage in my room; in the summer, the hot air collects, while in the winter, the heat is siphoned from the back of the house toward the front.
Despite that small imperfection in design, this is my home, my family's, and it carries the legacy of each generation that has lived within its walls. I do not feel that I am indulging in hyperbole to phrase my feelings that way. A few years ago, due to financial difficulties, my mother asked me to take the house into my name so that it would be kept in the family if her situation worsened. Being in college, and fearful of my academic career being sacrificed-I required student loans, and believed that by having a home worth such an amount, I would be unable to continue receiving financial aid-I told my mother that I could not help her.
This decision damaged me, to put it plainly. I remember being in my home for what I thought would be the last time, running my hands over the walls, feeling their texture, then laying on the floor and crying for the enormity of my choice, my shame and loss. My grandparent's home, my parent's, one day mine...and I had (in my mind) sacrificed it all for a chance at something I thought I wanted more than my own family. In that moment, I knew that if the house ever left my family's possession, if it ever went to someone else, or there were none in my family left to claim it...that I would in all likelihood burn the house down.
Fifty years of memories between this home and my family, and, having considered the question between Kimmith and I for the better part of the day, I know now what I would ask, if given just one question only. "Do you know how much we love you?"
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