Forty-two years ago or so, my mother, brother, and I came back to this house, which had been in the family for a long time, and reclaimed it. My grandfather owned it and rented it out for years to various tenants after his parents, who had been living there, died. He and my grandmother relocated to Arizona to retire.
Both had lived almost their entire lives in the Midwest, but visited Arizona once a year or so to visit my great aunt, who had bought a home there. My grandfather took to it, loved the hot weather, the eternally blue skies, the mountains. He loved that he could pick a grapefruit from the tree in the backyard and have it for breakfast. My grandmother must have had a bit too much of the Midwestern girl in her. One brutally hot day, when the irrigation flooded the backyard in Scottsdale, and dead fish were found floating in the water, she told him, “We’re moving back.” I don’t know exactly where truth ends and fiction begins in this story, but it is the stuff of family legend. And, at any rate, we did move back, and I know it wasn’t my grandfather’s idea.
When we got back to Springfield, my grandparents bought a newer house on the west side of town, and we moved back here. As much as I loved my grandparent’s house, I knew I loved it mainly because of who they were, their presence that filled it, rather than the house itself. I loved this house – the house itself – more than theirs, and so did my mom, I think. Maybe because of its age and its history, and its long connection to our family.
The history of this house is part of my history, as it is my mom’s. She remembered – she remembers – picking apples from the ancient apple tree in the back that we had to cut down when we moved in, the grape arbor that used to be there (which I found vestigial evidence of when I explored the back yard for the first time many years ago), her grandfather, a stately old German with an huge mustache who in pictures resembles Otto von Bismark, sitting in a rocking chair smoking a pipe in the living room. She remembers the time the pot of cooking applesauce exploded and left the stain on the kitchen ceiling, sitting down at the piano to play some hymns just because if you could play the piano and you loved to sing hymns that was something you did to pass the time on a Sunday afternoon, and watching out the front window to see me drive off in my great aunt’s Plymouth Sport Satellite on the day I left for my first year of college. And about a million or two other things: goodbyes, happy reunions, tears, births, deaths, everything that gives life weight and substance.
I tell her that we’ll make sure a suitcase is packed for her for our trip up to Evanston tomorrow, and she says “It reminds me of church work camp in Berlin, after the war. We could only take one bag with us.” Tomorrow morning we’ll leave, and she won’t see this place again. I will, if only to clean out her things. But this is the real goodbye to this old house, and I know it, and she knows that I know it. In a situation like that, what do you say, and how do you say it? I truly don’t know. Tomorrow, as we drive away, I'll probably say as little as possible, and just listen.
\
