It was built in 1965 and today in 2013 it stands as a time capsule.  Only the 93 year old matriarch who dusted and cared for it and filled it with antiques and knick knacks, the one who kept it warm in the winter and cool in the summer isn’t there anymore.  She is still in the area, in a nursing home.  This break-up happened in March 2013.  48 years after the house was built. 

I wanted to say something about this back in March but I couldn’t.  Also, back in May, but I couldn’t.  I don’t know how exactly to put into words the smell of the pantry, how to describe the way the light falls on the drop pendants that hang dustily from the faded chandeliers.  This was my house.  From the age of 3 until 8 years old I lived here.  It belongs to my grandmother whom I’ve referred to since childhood as ‘Me Ma’ whom I lived with full time during that time of my life.  This house was my sanctuary.  It was my childhood rock solid foundation and certainty in an uncertain world.  It was a place I could always come home to time and time again when things kept changing.  The house shaped me into who I am today because it was always just simply there.

In almost any given time in the decades since 1965 while the political landscapes changed, and the faces of war changed, and the people changed, you could count on several things.  You could count on the fact that the very antique 1940’s GE table fan would be buzzing above the kitchen sink when you opened the back door, a sound heard year round even in the winter.  In most occasions there would be food cooking on the kitchen stove in an aluminum pot, most likely some form of beans like butter beans.  There was always fruit in the fruit bowl and very unhealthy boxed bakery goods like Little Debbie snacks or Twinkies on the kitchen counter.  The radio would always be on and it would be tuned to KSST and up until he died you would at some point during the day always hear ‘Paul Harvey News and Comment’ because this is when my Me Ma would turn the radio up really loudly, and as a kid this was one of the few times when you had to be very quiet and not ask questions.  The rest of the time KSST would play classic country and it was usually some sort of wailing sad tune with background singers like the Ray Charles classic “I Can’t Stop Loving You” which very much so reminds me of this house because the radio played it so much growing up.  Though planet Earth turned day in and day out away from the 1960s and 1970s decades KSST’s radio programming never did, making the sounds of the house stuck right in line with the furnishings and fixtures still present:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_7iRVtxui8

Nothing in the house has changed since it was built in 1965.  The wallpaper is the same.  The carpet is the same.  95% of the light fixtures are still the same.  The Kenmore deep freeze in the garage is from 1965 and still runs.  There are books on the bookshelves from the 1960s and 1970s.  These things carry a certain smell and a certain energy that even when I’m in a used bookstore halfway across the United States in San Francisco and I pick up a paperback novel from that era I am reminded of something very familiar and very comforting.  I carry this era with me. 

The ironic contrast to the perfectly intact retro interior is reflected on the outside.  Here things tried to stay original but by the force of nature could not.  The massive rose gardens that used to line the front brick walls surrounding the property are long gone and you would never know that the splendid beauty of their colors and fragrance were even there to being with.  The garden outback is completely overgrown, the pear tree died years ago, many of the old oak trees have died in the recent drought and even the sunbaked orange brick out front has mostly crumbled into a whittled existence of orange dust and debris leaving places that were expected to be private exposed.  The burial plots of my favorite cat and my aunt’s favorite cat have been lost.  The funeral and burial grounds I held for the dozens of baby chicks from my Me Ma’s farm that I accidently drowned in the kiddie pool when I was 7 in 1987 are lost in an overgrowth of thicket.  The tree that I used to talk to and kiss as a young child where the mean fuzzy wood asp stung me one summer afternoon died years ago, as did the massive magnolia tree I used to climb out front. 

Perhaps keeping the interior outdated isn’t the way things are supposed to be, but having the exterior completely changed and renewed by mother nature is the exact force of life, meaning it is absolutely meant to change.  Only I don’t know how to completely do this myself.  I don’t know how to separate this place from myself even when I am forced to do so through the evident marching on of time.

Up until the ambulance came and took her away to Baylor hospital in downtown Dallas this past March when I would visit every time I would sleep with my grandmother in her massive California king sized bed.  This meant that I did this up into my 30’s, a fact that creeped out some of my family members.  No thank you, I have no interest in sleeping in the spare bedroom in another room though if they were in town too for the holidays they would always ask me with concern in their voice.  What they don’t understand is that during the time period of my childhood when I lived with her I didn’t have my own bedroom, and so my bedroom was her bedroom and her bed was my bed too.  As an adult sleeping in my grandmother’s bed was something that I felt was natural even though that meant that I was sharing the bed with my grandmother because in essence it was still my bed too. 

Last year I started having dreams about the house.  It was the strangest thing because it was literally like the house was talking to me and trying to tell me something was going to be changing.  At one point one of these dreams included my grandmother who was contemplating passing over.  The next day I called her, and talked to her and she seemed okay.  She remarked during our conversation that for the first time in years she had a wonderful sleep the night before which was the night of my dream (she has been crippled with stomach ulcers and severe arthritis for years) and that she fell into such a deep slumber that night that she slept for more than 13 hours without waking once.

Like many things in life the house has secrets.  There are secret attic spaces and secret stories hidden in the various and sundry furnishings brought back from travels all over the world.  Before my grandfather left my grandmother after 50 years of marriage in a scandal in the early 1980s he had expressed quite an interest in collecting things from everywhere including hunting trips to boarder towns in Mexico, to antiques from overseas vacations over the years.  My uncle had things from Vietnam he brought to the house from his times spent in war over there.  Toys from various grandchildren’s childhoods fill the attic.  The house holds stories within stories in this. 

In the last couple of years of my grandfather’s life he began to feel guilt for walking out on this house and on my grandmother.  I was living with Me Ma my freshman year of college in the fall of 1998 and a couple of times a week you could see my grandfather loitering in the carport, bringing home grown vegetables to me and my grandmother for our dinner and trying to stick around to say hello and (perhaps?) make amends.  His vegetable visits happened more than once, and this always went over like a lead balloon with my grandmother, who would literally change a different color upon seeing his bobbing head moving around the carport from her vantage point of the kitchen window and she would scream and yell for me to “get him off her property right this instant!”.  I would have to be the one to go outside and gently explain to him that his presence wasn’t welcome in the house that he had helped to build and then (figuratively) destroy years later.  Not long after these carport-vegetable-visits my grandfather died in a nursing home just a few blocks from where my grandmother is currently living.

She hasn’t been able to admit to the family that she will never be able to go home.  She makes comments about “needing to do things” at the house but instead instructs us to organize her wardrobe closet drawers for the millionth time since she can’t walk anymore to do it herself and it’s the only thing in her nursing home room that needs organizing.  Privately to a family friend she confided that she won’t be going back. 

As for me I don’t know how to separate any of this.  Separate the matriarch from the house.  Are they two different things?  The house without her isn’t the same.  Its disarray is hurried even more now since she isn’t there to give watch.  The heartbeat is missing.  Yet the antique and outdated furnishings stand the same as they always have in decades past, and broken record players and board games with missing pieces fill the hall closets and remind me that keeping this doesn’t make life any more solid or certain as the changing technology and different stages of life would only be further proof that life does as it always will do—it goes on.