Lessons From Home

It had been twenty-fours years since she’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same.  How could that be?  How could it look the same when viewed by eyes that had surely changed.  In the years since she’d been here, she had grown.  Grown up, grown tired, grown away from what she thought she would be.

Coming here may have been a mistake.  Without ever really thinking about it, a part of her had felt that seeing the old house would validate what her life had become.  The opposite was true.  It was a condemnation.  The short grass, the ordered lilacs, the same porch swing.  She realized, standing on the sidewalk out front, that she had craved disarray.  She had wanted to see cracked glass and peeling paint.  She had wanted to get out of the car and be aghast at the cursed dilapidation that had descended on her childhood home.  She had wanted locusts.  

There were no locusts.  The house looked exactly the same and the sight of it made her want to cry.  Twenty-four years.  What could she have done with twenty four years of a life like this house.  A life that stayed true to what it was.  A life that cared for itself, not out of vanity, but because, at its heart, it knew that the love you give yourself is the most important. What could she have become, if she had learned the lesson this place was trying to teach her as a child?

She would never know.  

When she saw that it was listed for sale, after all this time, she couldn’t help herself.  She’d called the realtor and asked if she could tour the house alone.  It was a small town.  They knew.  So she was given the code to the lockbox on the front door.  She had it written down on the back of a matchbox in her purse.  She was almost entirely convinced that she would go inside.  But first she had to climb the steps.  And that would require that she walk the sidewalk.  It all seemed so far away, there across the yard.  

She steeled herself.  It was silly, really.  It was just a building.  She could let herself in, poke around a bit, and then congratulate herself on being so very calm.  She didn’t have to go upstairs.  If she wanted to, she could smoke a cigarette in the kitchen.  The thought made her smile and that smile carried her all the way to the door.  It took her too long to find the matches.  Why were her hands shaking?  She had to put the code in three times.  The latch thingy wouldn’t come out of the box thingy.  She had to pull down on it, hard, and when it finally did leap open, she was positive that she had broken it.  Nothing in her past had ever informed her of how much a lock box cost.  Another thing to worry about.  The doorknob would not turn all the way.  It wasn’t supposed to be this hard to open a door.  Just let me in.  Let me come back.  I need to.  

I really need to come back.

The door opened, and that god damn house smelled exactly the same.

The carpet in the hall was new.  It had been wood.  It had been squeaky.  The stairs were carpeted too.  Some tree somewhere had sacrificed itself to give people a different way to climb and now some house flipper had covered it up with beige number ten bullshit. 

She realized that she was rambling to herself.  She was still outside, looking in.  

She stepped through the door and onto the cloaking carpet.  The floor squeaked, and by God, she was home.

You can smile while crying, but it shouldn’t be done often.

She turned left toward the dining room.  This would save the kitchen for last. 

Her eyes went to the spot on the wall where the phone had been mounted.  It wasn’t there of course. Not now.  Someone had painted over the phone numbers of her friends.  They had been written in pencil.  Erasable. 

The light fixture was the same, and the window carried the same view.  Maybe the trees were taller. 

The living room was identical to memory, except it felt smaller.  The fireplace was not the sooty cave she remembered, and she could reach the mantle with ease.

The bathroom was clean, and that felt different, until she realized that it's past disorder was probably her fault. 

Finally the kitchen.  Where they had baked.  They had laughed.  She had hugged her while she cried and then later in the same spot, their roles reversed, the one crying, the other holding.  

She was in the kitchen a full minute before she realized what was wrong.  Someone had moved the stove.  It was a different stove, and that didn’t bother her, but it was in a different spot, and that very much did.  Why would someone move a stove?  Didn’t they know it was supposed to be in that corner? Across from the window.  Did they not realize that if you baked in the morning, when the sun was rising, and you opened the stove door that the sun would kiss what your love had wrought?  Were people this stupid.  How could they forget the most basic things?  Of the lessons her mother had taught her, the sun stove had been one of the deepest.  And these idiots had messed it all up.  Why did they do that to her?

She decided that she would not smoke a cigarette in her mothers kitchen, the way her mother used to, because both of them were dead.

The time had come.  Out the door or up the stairs. There were no other roads.  There were twelve steps if you didn’t count the landing, which you didn’t, because you could not thump your butt down it.  Twelve steps between down here and up there.  She climbed.  And because she was her mothers child and her father could go straight to hell, she did the last six steps on all fours, like a god damned lion.

There were three rooms up here.  And a closet.  Not good for hiding because the seekers checked there first.  The easiest room was the spare bedroom.  It was as empty now as it had felt back then.  Just a room.

Next down the hall was her parents room.  They had closed the door when they fought.  She could never figure out why.  She heard everything.  The yelling and the screaming.  Her fathers slurring voice and her mothers screech.  She had thought as a child that if you married someone you didn’t really like you would end up hating them.  She realized now, with a clarity that was unfamiliar, that you couldn’t hate people you didn’t love first.  If love were this house, then hate would be this bedroom.  She couldn’t stand it, but stayed, because there was only one room left. 

She had walked this hall as a baby.  Tottering and uncertain.  One hand on the wall to support herself.  One of her oldest memories was standing right here, just like this, looking at the painting of Elvis that hung at the end of the hall, all the days of her childhood.  There was nothing on the wall now.  Just smooth paint.  But she still felt the king's eyes, as he watched her enter her room.

It was exactly as it had been.  No one had changed the wall paper.  Her wild horses still danced their way to the ceiling.  She could not believe that they were still there.  She could not believe she had forgotten them.  Their names came to her.  These had not been scribbled hastily with a number two pencil, but rather etched carefully into the foundations of her heart.  She had so loved these horses.  There were five, in a pattern, repeating.  They began at the floor, and, one atop the other, they climbed all the way up the wall.  Buttercup first.  Then Rosemary.  Next Wild Side.  Next Pirate.  And finally, her favorite, Flour.  Not the plant, the ingredient.  They were all still right here, where she had left them.  Waiting for her.  

She dropped to her knees, pressed her forehead against Flours white flank, and wept.  She wept for the little girl, with all the dreams.  She wept for the horses, who never left.  She wept for her mother, who always cared.  She even wept for her father, or wept for the father shaped hole in her life.  

She cried hard and long and loudly.  Another of the deep lessons her mother had taught her was that there were some things that could only leave us if they rode our tears.  Out our eyes and off our chins.  

On her knees, in that place, something happened to her that she had not intended or expected.  It was not a change, but a return.  She felt ten again.  She felt what it had been like before everything had fallen apart.  She felt like a whole person.  It was like waking up from a scary dream, to find horses dancing in your room.  

She took something from that moment that she would carry with her.  Not a thought or a memory, but a feeling.  One that she had lost.  

She was not sure how long she could hold on to it.  Not sure if it would follow her down the steps.  Or out the door.  Or across the lawn. But she had it right now, and that was all that mattered.