The sale of my grandmother’s house, long unoccupied even before her death, seems now, after lingering on the market, to be a done deal. After a final, unexpected fee paid to deal with a termite infestation. While I should be wistful, outright sad even, having spent most of the summers of my childhood there, I am not. To be honest the place frightened me, a bit. It was subject to frequent break-ins, even after my grandmother moved in with my parents, even after they slowly over the last few years hauled out every stitch of furniture from the place, going so far as removing any curtains or window treatments so that burglars could plainly see it lay empty.
Not that I don’t have fond memories, climbing the sturdy limbs of the impossibly tall magnolia tree or swinging from the branches of fragrant dogwoods. Partaking in other country amusements like tying a string to the leg of a june bug to make a living, buzzing kite, catching fireflies in a jar, poking the requisite holes in the lid and holding the vain hope they wouldn’t expire overnight. Kicking around the yard on the hot, steamy days where the plump bumblebees circled and the thick, muggy air smelled of clover, and earth. Evenings spent eating a heaping, runny bowl of chocolate ice cream in front of the huge Magnavox television, thrilled by the exploits of the Duke boys, or Magnum P.I., or impatiently waiting for pizza from a Chef Boyardee kit — my favorite meal! — to cook. Bored afternoons spent poking around in overstuffed drawers, everything perfumed slightly by the pipe tobacco of a grandfather who died before I was born, who I knew only from stories and yellowing photographs. Sitting and listening to the staccato rhythm of my grandmother’s adding machine as she did the books. Playing Oak Ridge Boys or Statler Brothers 45s on the Hi Fi. Despite all that, I never felt entirely secure.
There was the night, either the power was out or I had just gotten out of bed to get a drink of water or to use the toilet, that I was sure I encountered a shimmering apparition dressed in Victorian garb: a vivid glowing presence contrasting with the pitch black stillness of the house. She appeared to be young, and terribly sad. I was also sure that the strange lights that flashed outside the windows, and low humming I heard while I was trying to drift to sleep, were alien spacecraft.
But not all the things that went bump in the night were the product of the over-active imagination of an adolescent boy that loved comic books and science fiction, the paranormal and the extraterrestrial. There was the evening that a very real, very bloodied, stranger, deranged from shock or just deranged, banged on the front door seeking assistance. (We knew he was a stranger because any passing acquaintance would’ve used the door off the carport. No one used the front door.) There was a frantic dash about the house to check all locks and close all curtains, in case this was a ruse for the man to gain access to the house, the sheriff was phoned, and if it wasn’t on that occasion someone uttered “fetch my gun” well it was surely said some other similar time. My grandmother, who knew how to shoot, kept her pearl-handled “Saturday night special” in her bedside drawer.
But the unsettling evenings always gave way to bright hot mornings, which were a time for exploration. I’d pace the property, fancying myself an amateur detective, looking for clues among the detritus at the side of the road. A spent gun shell, burnt rubber tire tracks, bottle caps, whatever remains I could construct a nefarious, sordid narrative around. There seemed to be threats around every inch of the place, from the invasive wasps who built their nests in the bricks to the black widow spiders who may have been lurking in the musty basement. There were required evening tick checks after walks in the woods, the creatures which if they were found dispatched with a slathering of Vaseline or the hot tip of an extinguished match.
I suppose it never occurred to me or my sister that we were subjected to the paranoia and neuroses of our elders, being too young to process that. Not that they weren’t right to fret, sometimes. Staying on that isolated strip of road, where someone had poisoned my grandmother’s dog, where drunk drivers routinely sped past, sometimes flipping their cars in the ditch, and so near the railroad tracks where vagabonds may or may not have set up camp. But it was hard to discern what was just good sense and what was fueled by a certain streak of paranoia than ran in the blood line, to untangle the real threats from the ingrained legends.
It is not that I’m not sympathetic to my mother and uncle, who grew up in that house, and to the agony of cutting one of the last tethers to their past. I just have trouble empathizing. I have my share of sentimental attachments, but they never seem to center on physical locales. Only a small collection of kin still call that stretch of road home, the others having died of old age or illness, or moved away. Long passed are the days of homemade ice cream on Fourth of July gatherings, of cousins of all ages stumbling and squealing in the grass, of paying a visit to the cool, clammy damp of the canning shed, where rows of fruits and vegetables in mason jars lined handmade shelves.
There are still things to celebrate about that stretch of property, and those certain moments when we were all together, when the events we gathered for were more often parties than funerals. But I also have a pragmatic streak (perhaps developed in opposition to certain behaviors observed in my youth), that says rather than try to buttress the physical structure against change and time, and fail, it is okay to cut ties. It is just a house after all, right? So long as we never forget the people who made it a home.
