What I Couldn’t Say But Still Remember

The farmhouse in Ephratah was enormous—white and square, Italianate-style, with a flat roof and a cupola on top. It had tall windows, twelve-foot ceilings, and four huge rooms on the first floor, with a hardwood staircase at the center. I had never seen anything like it. Our first house—like my grandparents’ and the Barrys’—was a small, one-story ranch.

We moved in on a warm summer day. I went to inspect my new room. I couldn’t believe how big it was—at least three times larger than my old one. I went to the closet. At first, it looked like a regular closet, but if you turned to the left, it went back another four feet. There were three large shelves in the back. This would make a great fort or hiding spot.

Inside the baseboard heat register, I found a plastic bead necklace. I knew it was a gift just for me, from the house. It was welcoming me.

My mother told me to go outside—I was underfoot. But this time, she didn’t assign my sister to supervise me. I was five, and alone for the first time ever.

My only experience with “outside” had been front lawns and backyards. This place was surrounded by rolling hills, farm fields, and woods. I was completely alone that entire day and traveled for miles. No one looked for me or called for me.

I didn’t know it yet, but the land itself had stories to tell—just like the house.

I lived in that house from age five and a half to nine and a half. Over time, it became more than just a house—it was my friend. There were so many curious features and quiet mysteries. So many things to do, to look at, to wonder about.

I didn’t know anything about history yet, but I could feel how old the house was. I used to imagine all the people who had lived there before me. Sometimes, it felt like they were still there, watching.

Up the hill behind the house was a cemetery—really old. It was overgrown with tall grasses and pink wild roses, untouched for years. Five or six headstones sat shaded beneath an old, twisted tree. The stones were worn down, moss-covered, and unreadable.

My mother told me not to go up there. She said I’d “fall in.” I pictured myself suddenly plunging through the ground into some deep, secret hole beneath a grave.

But I went anyway.

I always tiptoed carefully around the headstones, giving them plenty of space—just in case. Years later, during a local history project in high school, I found out those graves belonged to the very first people who had lived in our house.

That little cemetery became my special place.

Uncle Frank, the people who had lived in the house before me, and the graves on the hill all had something in common: people who used to exist—or could once be seen—who now no longer existed and couldn’t be seen. But I knew they were there.

And in my child’s mind, I wanted them to know they weren’t forgotten. I knew they had lived. I was sorry for them, because it seemed like everyone else had forgotten.

I liked going up there because I thought maybe they liked being remembered. Maybe they liked the attention.

Also, it was very quiet and peaceful. There was a constant light breeze, and the hill stood higher than our house. When I turned around to look back, the house looked much smaller. It gave me a different vantage point—one where I could see the beautiful countryside all around.

One day, I brought two school friends, Liz and Heather, up there. Liz started picking the roses, and I got upset. I knew they were wild; no one had planted them. But it still felt wrong.

I told her to stop. She picked them anyway.

On the way back down the hill, she tripped and sprained her ankle. Heather and I had to carry her the rest of the way.

It was my first understanding of karma.

The house had four large rooms downstairs, divided by a central hardwood staircase with a long, smooth banister I loved to slide down. The front room to the left was the dining room.

Across the hall was what had originally been a formal parlor—large, with high ceilings. It sat empty and unused the entire time we lived there. It had brand-new, wall-to-wall white shag carpet, and the door was usually kept shut.

I would sneak in (making sure my shoes were off) to run, dance, and do cartwheels.

The year I turned eight, I was given a maroon three-speed bike for my January birthday. It was too early to ride outside, so it stayed in that room, resting on its kickstand until spring.

I’d go in often just to sit on it, my body leaning heavily to the left with the kickstand still engaged. I’d stare out the floor-to-ceiling windows and imagine myself riding down the maple-lined road, pedaling faster and faster with no real destination—the jagged metal grips on the pedals poking into my sock feet.

It was another beautiful space that no one seemed to care about but me.

At the back of the house was the kitchen, and across from that, a den or TV room.

Tucked between the den and the kitchen was a huge, grotesque “Roman” bathroom built by the previous owner. It had red shag carpet, red velvet-striped wallpaper, and three steps up to a fiberglass tub that must have been three feet deep, ten feet long, and four feet wide.

We only tried it a couple of times. The fiberglass was covered in sharp little points, and my parents were afraid we’d run the well dry.

Next to the bathroom was a dumbwaiter built into the wall. Across from the bathroom was the door that led down to the cellar.

Upstairs, the layout was just as symmetrical. At the top of the stairs, my bedroom was immediately to the left. Across the hall was the guest room, and next to that, in the corner, a bathroom. Originally, a set of stairs had gone down to the kitchen where the bathroom was now.

There was a window on the back wall that looked out over the fields and hills behind our house. My mother put a cabinet under the window with an 1800s-style wash basin on top. In summer, when the window was open, the white sheer curtain would blow gently, and I could see the twisted tree where the graves were.

Standing at the window, looking out, I imagined all the people who had come before me—standing in that exact same spot, looking out just as I was. For a moment, I felt transported back in time.

Down a long hallway, my parents’ bedroom was on the left, and my sister’s was on the right.

The most interesting part was the other staircase—the one that switched back up to the cupola. It was as long and steep as the first set, but the steps got narrower the higher you went. It wasn’t exactly a room, more like a square lookout with windows that opened on all four sides. You could sit up there—barely—and see the countryside in every direction. I think I was the only one who ever went up there. It got extremely hot, and there were always a bunch of dead flies, but I didn’t care.

My parents told me it was where people used to go to watch for Indian attacks. Of course, I believed them. Later in life, I learned cupolas were usually just decorative.

But that was typical of my parents. They told stories or made things up—to be funny, or interesting, or to manipulate you. It took me a long time to stop believing them.

That first summer—and every summer after—I wandered and explored all the land around our house. I made forts in the woods, pressed paths through the tall grasses, and invented games, people, and missions in my imagination.

I found what I called “bouncing trees”—fallen trees still attached at the base. If you walked the trunk like a balance beam, the closer you got to the top, the bouncier it became. You could bounce on it like a trampoline. That was great fun. I showed them to my sister, and she liked bouncing on them too.

There were a few times she came with me into the fields and woods. Little cricks (smaller than creeks) ran through the acres, and we found one spot that made a perfect wading hole for hot summer days. My sister got in first and sat for a while.

When she stood up, her back and legs were covered with black leeches. She started screaming.

Grossed out, I plucked and flung them off one by one as blood ran down her skin.

I decided to stay hot that day.

Another time, she got excited thinking she’d found a bunch of puffballs—small brown pods we liked to pop to see the dust puff out. But I knew what she really had was rabbit poop. I didn’t say anything. I just watched her grab a whole handful and say, “Cool! Puffballs!” and then squish it between her fingers.

There was no puff.

I think that was the last time she played with me outside.

I loved the red-winged blackbirds that skimmed the tops of the fields, perching on tall stalks of grass. I learned their call, and even now I know it immediately. Orange and yellow Indian Paintbrushes and waves of goldenrod were scattered throughout the hills and fields.

Occasionally, a crab apple tree would appear. I’d lie in the grass and watch giant green grasshoppers leap from blade to blade. Their ability to hang on while completely vertical always amazed me. I’d pick tall milkweed and split the pods open with my thumbs, pulling out the silk and watching the sticky white milk run down my fingers.

Out there, nothing was taken—only given.

One day, I found a perfectly formed, abandoned bird’s nest and kept it because I thought it was so neat. A couple of weeks later, I found a dead robin in another spot. I felt bad for it and then remembered the nest. I retrieved it, placed the robin inside, and carried it up behind the house, stopping halfway to the little cemetery. I dug a hole, buried the bird in its nest, and gently filled the dirt back in.

Then I sat on a nearby log, just thinking. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket and found a bunch of gumballs I’d forgotten were in there.

I took it as a reward for doing a good thing. Karma again.

I also remember the dusk.

I always had to be home before dark, but I would wait until the very last minute. Inevitably, I’d end up walking home at dusk.

To this day, dusk unsettles me. It feels lonely and sad—hauntingly beautiful, with fear mixed in.

One day, I was walking down the hall, dragging my hand along the wall and my fingernail caught under the seam of the wallpaper. An entire sheet lifted off the wall.

I was terrified. I knew my father would kill me, and there was no way to hide it or fix it on my own.

I ran to my mother and showed her what I’d accidentally done.

What I saw on her face—but only for a moment—shifted the axis.

I saw her panic. Her fear.

And I understood, in that instant, that she was just as powerless and terrified of him as we were.

She ran and got glue and quickly pressed the sheet back down. All she said was, “Well… we won’t do that again, will we?”

He never found out.

But from that moment on, I knew—there was never going to be any help coming.

The brass bed in the guestroom had two posts on the footboard, each topped with a round ball finial.

As we got closer to moving, I realized we weren’t taking the bed with us. I took a scrap of paper, wrote “I am here. 993-3474,” folded it up, and dropped it inside one of the hollow posts. Then I slid the finial back on.

Of course, that logic doesn’t make sense now.

But at the time, I believed that if I was lost, someone might find me—if they found the note and called the number.

As if I existed inside the phone number for the house.

The morning we left for the airport, we loaded into the car. I was looking out the back window as we pulled out of the gravel driveway when I realized, suddenly, that I wasn’t ready.

I hadn’t said goodbye.

I had just gone about my business that morning—got up, got dressed, made my cereal. I’d been thinking about the airplane ride ahead, wondering if I might get to go to Disney.

And I didn’t take note of all the things I would never see again.

I desperately wanted to scream for my mother to stop the car.

I wanted to get out and run as fast as I could back to the house.

I wanted to go through it one last time—room by room—to take it all in and burn it into my memory.

I wanted to go up to the cupola and scan the hills, the fields, the woods, one last time.

I wanted to say, thank you.

That house had saved me in its beauty, its spaces, its mysteries.

It gave me both a physical and a mental place to escape to.

I wanted to say, I will miss you. I will remember you.

I wanted to whisper, I love you.

But of course, I couldn’t do that.

I was too sensitive.