Home … Home

She hadn’t told anybody she was coming here, because she didn’t believe it herself until she was standing in front of the house where she had grown up. Her home. The place of residence she’d called home even after she’d moved out and far away. The place she’d call home until her dying day.

There was a reason she’d come, a reason why she’d taken some days off work and taken a little extra out of the bank to come home. Even if she couldn’t go inside or even knock on the door. She didn’t even know who lived there now, but supposed the residents had changed once or twice since she’d been an occupant. None of that mattered, because she was there simply to take a few pictures. Her memories had grown fainter, and she was loath - such a great word and very fitting - to let that happen. She needed to renew them, brighten up the colors with fresh mental paint. Then she would feel better and could return to where she lived, knowing she wouldn’t have to repeat the process for another twenty years.

Her phone took very good pictures, so she could be discrete. It would be simple to walk by and snap a few shots. Nobody would notice her, because nobody in town knew who she was anymore and certainly the current residents would have no way of recognizing her. It was like she was posthumous, as the great poet Bergamín had said when he realized he was. The Great Memories of The Great House were hers and hers alone.

Tragic, if you thought about it, but she wasn’t thinking about it.

She wanted to take the shots from a series of angles, just to make sure she didn’t miss anything she might want to have for her soon-to-be-restored memories. After all, who knew where she was going to be in twenty years, when she’d need to return. Life can move in mysterious directions…

There needed to be a photo from each side of the house as she stood on Main Street looking at the front door. One side was the still-gravel driveway and the other side was the neighbors’ driveway, which might or might not be paved. (She didn’t know who the neighbors were, hadn’t known from the time the little woman who lived there and lent her books if she made paper bag covers for them had passed away. The sweet lady had willed her the piano from her sitting room, but once inherited, the instrument was rarely played and ended up junked along with many other things.

Between the driveways and the neighboring houses there was very little distance. No more than six feet. Still, the houses were all big and old, so there had always been a sense of space. Main Street had also had much less traffic, unlike its current noisy, over-charged-with-cars state. She thought it had thirteen rooms, memory served, and windows on all sides. It might have been 4,000 square feet (not counting the cellar). Which was the reason all of her places of residence after moving out had seemed minuscule. 

So two or three shots of each lateral. At least she didn’t have to make sure the mulberry tree got in one of them because the tree had been cut down. It was always awful when the fruit fell off and splished all over the car, she remembered. That really perturbed her mother. She’d never asked, though, if it really was a mulberry tree. Her mother told her the splishing fruit was poisonous and, more than that, it was the only mulberry tree she’d ever heard anyone talk about. All the rest had always been bushes, mulberry bushes. Only that, and nothing more, as the poem by Edgar Allan Poe goes.

She also didn’t need to make sure the barn in back to the right was in at least one shot. That was because some young punks, at least one of whom was related to her, had gone in there to smoke pot and didn’t put out a joint properly. The barn. Nearly two hundred years old, had burned to the ground. When that happened, she heard about it and severely regretted only having explored the rickety building twice, both times with her father, so long gone. She knew, however, that very valuable things had gone up in smoke. Things that had been hers.

She managed to get up enough courage to walk around to the back, far enough to see that there were still remnants of a rock garden visible, although the hens and chicks that had fascinated her were definitely in decline. She turned away, not wanting a picture of that. Walking back toward the front, she saw a pink primrose beneath what she knew was the (drafty) kitchen window, caught sight of a few patches of lilies-of-the-valley, glimpsed some random tulips planted by nobody anybody ever knew, and ran into crocuses, ferns, hostas, plus a ridge of spiraeas. Bushes, not trees.

She wasn’t clear on how it was possible to see all of the flowers and shrubs in bloom at the same time, because they had never bloomed or sprouted green leaves in unison. Oh, and there were daffodils as well as a hyacinth or two. Lots of lovely plants along the side of the house because it was huge.

She wasn’t feeling brave enough to travel down the left side of the house, because the neighbors might get suspicious, whoever they were. It was probably enough that remembered what grew there: bleeding hearts, fancier daffodils, columbines or aquilegia, more tulips, jasmine, honeysuckle, forsythia. All pretty old when she’d lived there as a girl. She knew there must be two baby turtles buried under the honeysuckle in a glass container with cotton balls and a satin ribbon inside. She also knew the story of how they came to die, but needed to forget that.

Since the things that grew in the backest part of the back yard would require another trip toward that area, she decided to forego that move and tried to saunter back to the front in as casual a manner as possible. If she were questioned, she’d say she was merely a person who was curious about brick houses that were two centuries old. That would work.

However, there were other angles she wanted to photograph. There was the brownstone front porch, massive and unattractive, that actually started in front and made a curved turn around the driveway side. Quite elegant, unusual, and older than vintage. Of course the porch had a trellis and some tiny little roses winding upward with its support. Dark pink. Fragile and brief. The trellis was painted white, but it had lost its power to support the roses after a number of years. Her mother had not wanted to replace it. Her mother had also stopped filling the planters on the porch with pansies, marigolds, ivy, and ageratum. 

There were a few more shots she wanted to get. Like the windows on the upper floor that had formerly framed many things and people. Inside and out, although inside was no longer an option. She supposed the fluted columns had to enter the picture, if not all seven, at least a couple. Once they, like the house, had been the a yellow the color of… well, faded yellow, with the faded part sitting right on top of the original shade. It had rubbed off on fingers and clothing, but nobody worried about lead back then. Not in paint, not in water pipes.

Perhaps the most important parts remaining to be photographed were the front door (reddish metal but also drafty); the number of the house (19, the column said, but the real number was 433 and had been for a hundred years); the gargoyle rain pipes. Gorgeous gargoyles, one of which she had removed as a keepsake on her last visit. Her mother hadn’t noticed, fortunately.

Funny, how years later she would fall in love with gargoyles in other parts of the world, even though the more recent ones were mostly made of granite not rusting iron. She didn’t think hers were all that unique, but they were rare for a house in that town and on Maine Street. Yes, she could get the 19, the gargoyle, porch, and columns all in the same shot. Then she might be done. It was safer there on the sidewalk, in plain view. She wasn’t trespassing like she had been while exploring rear portions of the enormous house. 

And she’d been strong enough to resist the desire to knock on the ugly, drafty door to see if they’d let her in for a few minutes. She felt good about that, felt good that she’d replenished her store of memories and could leave.

She was concentrating so hard on making the last photograph as perfect as possible, that she hadn’t noticed a person watching her. Even if she had noticed the person, she was not likely to recognize the figure standing there as one of the idiot kids responsible for burning down the barn. That really had been dangerous and if any sparks had been blown toward the house, it too might have gone up in flames, along with her mother.

She shook off that thought and focused on getting the perfect angle. That was why she didn’t see that the figure several feet off, tattooed everywhere and looking very angry, was holding a gun. Odd as that might seem, a gun, small but effective and was going to be used. The figure wasn’t angry that she had trespassed (minimally), but for other reasons that had nothing to do with memories and everything to do with not having been the chosen one. The one who was supposed to have inherited the house but hadn’t.

She was to blame for that, apparently.

She had to pay, obviously.

Which she did.

*****

Maybe that was a good thing. 

If she had left and returned to her current residence far away, she would have immediately wanted to look at the images in larger size.She would have turned on her laptop and started reviewing the results of her efforts, her long trip there and back.

Then she would have noticed the faintest of faint images if she’d had time to go over them later, on her computer’s large screen. She would barely have been able to make them out. They hadn’t looked like that on the screen of her phone.

The faded memories, ones that looked like the old Kodak photos from three or four decades ago, would have broken her heart.

Because that was all that really was left of the house on Main Street.

Apparently, you can’t go home again, like in the novel by Thomas Wolfe.

Can’t.

Or shouldn’t.