The picture on the two large-screen TVs that flank both sides of the sanctuary was a cartoon depiction of a garage with door bulging on all sides. Our minister said, “That’s my garage. It needs cleaning out and a lot of stuff needs to be thrown away. But like our houses and our closets, it’s hard to get rid of things we have an emotional attachment to and, as strange as it seems, things we don’t even like for the same reason.”
Getting home after church I checked my email and Facebook messages. A friend had posted a photo on Facebook of a small 1960s ranch-style home; overgrown grass and out-of-control shrubs threatening the nostalgia of the photo. He wrote, “It’s just an ordinary house beside the old bridge and railroad tracks, but it evokes a lot of memories. The owner was a close friend of my mom’s (and worked at my dad’s store). I used to visit regularly with her as a child and be entertained by her daughters who had a great collection of 45 RPM records, including Elvis Presley and early Beatles.”
Not seeing a coincidental pattern emerging, I left my office to return later and find another friend that lives in Ohio had posted a photo of an Ohio home built in 1903. He wrote, “In my mom’s 1945 journal, she wrote about the house they rented in 1930 during the Depression after they lost their home when the stock market crashed. She had mentioned that they lived on the street that runs just behind where my work office is in the area of Akron. I found my grandfather’s name and the address in the 1931 Akron Street Directory (these are available online). My mom mentioned that it was an older home (built in 1903). The houses on the street today have either been well cared for, or are in need of some love.”
Then I became aware of the coincidence of the recurring theme of the day … three people I know well had shared with me … and a bunch of other people … how places, things and inanimate objects such as clothing, buildings and even trash, kept those things alive and meaningful to them, not because of what they were but because of what they meant to my friends and my minister on an emotional level. Because of this unusual coincidence, I felt compelled to write about it.
My grandmother’s home in North Carolina was a stately old 100-year-old home with a beautiful, but decaying façade supported by 4 white concrete pillars. One pillar had a crack in the concrete and inside the pillar was a drain pipe that funneled rain from the gutters through the inside of the pillar and onto the ground in some remote area of the yard. Apparently the pipe had been breached and leaked, rotting the concrete inside the pillar. As a child I was delighted that when it rained heavily water would literally spew from the crack in the pillar and my mom said it looked like a tall old man, “taking a leak.” I would laugh and clap my hands and pray for rain just so I could be witness, again and again, to that delightful spectacle.
The house had been a funeral home many years before and I was intrigued and a little frightened at the thought of that. My mom and I lived there with my grandmother after the untimely death of my dad and there were many places to explore and roam, like the old carriage house behind the main house and the coal house. I remember year-after-year a family of feral cats gave birth to litters of kittens just on the other side of the graying wooden fence that separated my grandmother’s property from that of her neighbors. I spent a summer attempting to catch one of those kittens. When I finally did I scampered into the house clutching the frightened creature to my chest with a death grip and promptly let it go just inside the front door. It took 2 days to locate the kitten and send it gratefully back to the fence and the paws and warm tongue of its feral mom. My mom said it was a terrible couple of days but I LOVED knowing the kitten was INSIDE and essentially mine.
I have lived a number of places since my grandmother’s old house and I’ve lived in Virginia; a state away. Her house with the ghost stories and leaking front porch pillar was torn down decades ago and a Kroger replaced it on the lot. I’ve been back home to North Carolina dozens of times and know that old house isn’t there anymore. But that is the ONLY place I’ve lived that I dream about.
In my dreams I find myself walking down that familiar street. I see the driveway and that old house set back off the road with its grand appearance and I know that one of the concrete pillars leaks in the rain, making children laugh and clap their hands at the vision so like an old man taking a leak. In my dream I can smell the aroma of lunches cooking on Sunday when the preacher had been invited to share that meal with us after church. I can see that lovely dining room. I remember winter mornings getting dressed under the covers because the furnace long before had become non-functional and was too costly to repair. It didn’t get warm until my grandmother or my mom got up and built a fire.
Maybe the coincidence of Sunday, brought about by three friends that have nothing in common except the commonality of having me as a friend and member of a church congregation, happened just to open my mind and my heart to remembering that old house that is such a part of me. In the comments and posts of my friends I saw a version of my younger self that remains today as part of who I am. That memory gave me a fuller understanding of what they were trying to say in their posts and in the cartoon photo of a bulging garage my minister greeted the congregation with on Sunday morning.
Seldom is anything just a house, or just a car, or just an old gas station or a discarded sweater. They carry with them the weight … and often the beauty … of memories of all that had a connection to them in one way or another. That’s why it makes us so sad when they are torn down or put in the garbage. It’s not just the loss of history, but the loss of thousands of memories that connect us to them … that are the life that energized them and still does in our mind and in our heart.
heimdalco 