A house of memories

I can’t remember what day, exactly, that they tore my grandma’s house down.

It was cold, I think. Sometime after Christmas in those interminable gray days of January and February that make up so much of winter in the midwest.

I wasn’t there, though.

My brother called to tell me that the process had started, something we’d known was going to happen at some point, but pushed out of our minds. His voice was flat, almost toneless, the way he talks when he’s upset about something but doesn’t really want you to know.

My throat constricted, and suddenly, in the quiet of my work day, I felt dangerously close to tears.

The news itself wasn’t a surprise, exactly. After Grandma Ruby’s death two Junes ago, there had been many discussions of what would become of her house. And while I had heard all the logical reasons for tearing down her house—no one had lived in the house for a long time, it would take a lot of money to fix it, who would live there?—logic often does nothing to soothe emotions. Plus, talking about tearing something down and actually doing it are two very different things.

And to me, tearing down my Grandma’s house felt a little like trying to erase her from our lives.

Long after my brother and I had ended that conversation, I pictured the men and the equipment that were tearing down the house that had been such a big part of my childhood. In my mind’s eye, I saw them start the process, picking apart the house room by room.

They began with the rooms with names, still called by the names of the aunts and uncles who had inhabited them long before I was born. Linda’s room was first, with its north and west facing windows and gauzy curtains, where a twin bed had sat tucked into a corner. I’d always thought it was a beautiful little room and to picture the gaping hole where it once had been felt like a gaping hole had been torn in my heart.

The boys’ room came next. The boys’, of course, refers my dad and his brothers. It was what my grandma called her sons even after their hair had turned gray, even after dementia had robbed her of their names. It was the name we called the room, my brother and I, even though as children it seemed impossible to imagine that those men who were our Grandma Ruby’s boys had ever been boys at all.

I imagine that Grandma’s room came next, the small little bedroom with the double bed and the pretty hurricane lamp with the yellow rose painted on it. The nightstand with the picture of my granddad who died before I was born. The place where my grandma had stood in front of the mirror and put on her jewelry, maybe even the turquoise ring I wear on my left hand.

Then came the living room, where we never sat or played, and the dining room, with the big south-facing window and the peach curtains, where the golden afternoon light filtered in, leaving warm patches on the carpet and the big pine dining room table, reflecting off the depression glass dishes sparkling on the hutch. I always remember that room in the waning light of summer afternoons, at that moment when the light turns golden and gilds everything. As a child, I thought it was the most beautiful room in the world.

Next came the kitchen, with the out-of-style pine cabinets and black hinges, where we’d spent many a night at Grandma’s making popcorn on the stovetop.

And finally, the room she called the “breezeway” or the “back porch,” a room built on to the back of the house at some point before I was born that served as the main gathering area. It was here that she sewed, read, watched TV, sat by the fire, maybe even painted her paintings. One hung over the huge mantle and the big brick hearth in front of the fireplace. Beautiful tongue-and-groove planks made the ceiling extravagant, an unexpected touch in a modest house. It was there in that room that we would spend time with Grandma, talking, laughing, eating popcorn and drinking copious amounts of sodas that weren’t allowed at home.

It’s been a few years since the house has been torn down, and I still haven’t gone down the road from my parents’ house to see the place where it used to stand. When I stay in my old bedroom, one of the windows faces her house, and I always stand in just the right place where my aunt and uncle’s house obscures the view and I can’t tell that her house is gone.

But it isn’t really gone, is it? It’s burned into my memory and my heart. And that house of memories will stand as long as I live.