The house I grew up in is gone.
My grandfather was born in a small farmhouse in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in 1913. Sixty-three years later, my parents brought me home from the hospital to the same house. My grandfather retired to Ft. Myers, Florida, but left a small camper that he and my grandmother stayed in when they visited. Grandpa was a small man, but he lit up a room with his smile. He didn’t hand out approval easily, but when he did it hit like a wave. He was wiry and weathered the way you imagine old New Englanders; Robert Frost and E. E. Cummings, rugged and righteous, wise and wise-ass. I looked forward to those visits every summer. When Grandpa was there, we never watched TV. We worked hard outside all day; he always looked the place up and down when he arrived, sighed with his whole body, then went into the garage and got his old tools and got to work. I followed him around, learning things about plants that my father either didn’t know or didn’t care to teach me. We stayed up late and drank lemonade and played dice and caught fireflies. My sister told me that while she was dating her husband, she pointed at my grandfather and said, “Watch that man. He’ll teach you everything you need to know.” I could have told him that.
The house sat at the base of Mount Everett, and that mountain was my playground. My brothers were older and knew more of it than I did, but I spent my childhood climbing giant rocks and trees and swimming in a winding brook in my very own Terabithia. Years later, I proposed to my wife on that mountain. It wasn’t elaborate. It probably didn’t give her much of a story. But I couldn’t think of a better place to ask someone to spend the rest of her life with me than the magical kingdom where I’d faced and overcome so many dangers. I knocked myself unconscious one winter sledding head first down the narrow trail where the woods met the mountain. I remember seeing my friends running away before things went black; I assume they came back, possibly with an adult.
Sleepovers at my house meant sleeping bags in the barn, late-night games of flashlight tag in the corn field, and even later-night terrified sprints to the house to sleep on the dining room floor. One summer my friends and I found dirty magazines in the hay loft. It was very exciting and dramatic. After what seemed like an eternity but was probably a couple months of tantalizing guilt and pre-adolescent confusion, we nobly set them out in the rain. It’s easy to roll my eyes now, but in that moment we were purified.
We fed our wood stove all winter to heat the house, and that meant splitting firewood during the fall to stock the shed. We’d set the splitter up across the street and fill pickup truck after pickup truck in the crisp fall air, and while I’m sure I complained plenty, I never felt closer to my family. My brothers and sisters were teenagers and at least nine years older, but on those weekends we were together, doing honest work and banking our survival. Getting up first on a New England February morning and starting the fire with wood from the back of the shed – that was love.
I left for college in 1994. I came back during breaks, and much as I wanted to play the “college guy” part, nothing felt better than curling up under my old blanket on my bed next to the chimney. I sat in my room during winter breaks and wrote terrible poetry and felt very Thomas Pynchon, but I had seen Paris (Ohio), so how were they gonna keep me down on the farm? I came home on breaks less and less as college went on, and finally I graduated and rented an apartment just outside Dayton. I was a Midwesterner.
My mother died in 2005, 10 years after my grandfather. My father sold the house while she was in the hospital. My father, the self-appointed minister, the arbiter of all things holy, the man who taught me that the road to God was narrow and ran right through his backyard, unmade my connection to family, to history, to beautiful dreams and knuckle-scraping reality. The house that passed from generation to generation didn’t make it to mine.
I haven’t spoken to him since.
I hear the house looks lovely these days. The barn fell down before my mother died, and the old garage and driveway are gone. I hear there’s a nice circular drive. I don’t know if the new owner tore it down and rebuilt or just remodeled the old house. I don’t know which I’d prefer. I’ve said for years that I don’t care who owns it as long as it’s loved. I’m such a liar.
I won’t belabor the metaphor. I have some things to set out in the rain.
