Two Homes
Embracing the messiness
I took a walk—two walks actually—around a town I used to live in last month. I knew the walk would be teeming with memories, crowds of ghosts watching from every street corner, so I made a deal with myself. Just experience it. Don’t pre-judge. Don’t predict. Don’t try to spin easy morals or clever observations out of the experience.
Don’t frikkin’ write in my head. That, frankly, was my most important commandment to myself. A lot of my stories have these streets and houses as background, including one I’d just finished. And I have a long history of holding reality at arm’s length by filtering it through a writer’s eye. So, no writing, I told myself.
Just walk.
We lived in two different homes in that town. Two wildly different experiences occurred in those homes.
The first home was a little starter home I bought with my wife, just before we were married. Three years after we moved in we adopted our two daughters. My memories of that home are of happy times: tumbling together on the couch, playing under the sprinkler in the backyard, wiffle ball games, bike riding, yadayadayada. It was a genuinely joyful and loving house.
The girls got a little older, we decided we needed a bigger house, and we moved. The move was exciting, the house we were moving to was over a hundred years old, Victorian-ish, and thought by every little kid in the neighborhood to be haunted (amateur ghost hunters actually spent the night in the house before we moved in, and I talked to them: they found nothing).
My wife got sick in that house. Over the next six years, we watched her die.
My memories are understandably colored by that long slow death. They messed with my head, and the heads of our kids, for a very long time. They’re still messing with us, though their strength is receding into the background. Just as powerful a force, but more distant in time.
So, my two walks, that day I returned to the place I used to live, were around those two neighborhoods. The joyful Happy Home neighborhood, and the scary House of Doom neighborhood.
An interesting thing happened.
Things got messy.
I walked the Happy Home neighborhood first. All the usual happy memories asserted themselves, knee-jerk first-glance reactions. I kept to my plan of not pre-judging, not predicting, not frikkin’ writing in my head. I remembered tantrums. I remembered crippling sibling rivalry between the girls. I remembered the little girl who lived down the street, slightly older than my girls, and adored by them, a role model, and how near the end of our time on the block, the trajectory of her life seemed to suddenly shift, and become sadder, and more precarious.
I thought about her a lot, passing her old house, and wondered where she is now. I hope she is okay.
I walked the House of Doom neighborhood next. It was only about a five minute drive away. The sheer number of memories was overwhelming, pelting me like kids flinging snowballs. Again, I did my best not to pre-judge the experience. I walked down the alley behind the house, then around the block, the house looming over my entire walk like a disapproving parent.
Yes, I remembered several incident that were tinged with trauma, and I don’t want to discount the power of those memories: they are formidable forces in my life, then and now. However. I remembered this goofy kid across the alley who my kids used to play with, and how he tagged along when we shot off Estes model rockets out on the edge of the city (it was spectacularly fun). I remembered the Mentos/Diet Coke experiment, the Wizard of Oz Halloween costumes, the homemade magic wands (our kids were so disappointed they didn’t actually work).
I remembered the wise and funny older lady who counseled my daughters while their Mom was dying. I remember her counseling me, when I had no clue what to do next. She has since passed, sadly. I miss her. So do my daughters.
And that’s the lesson of the two homes. Plenty of sad memories in the land of the Happy Home. Plenty of happy times in the House of Doom. Things were messier than I remembered. I think if I had approached either of those walks with personal preconceived narratives, I’d only have uncovered my existing templates: one place happy, one place sad. That’s not true, though. The journey of the two homes lasted a full decade, and was a gradual walk from light into darkness, and back out again. Most of that time was spent in liminal spaces, a transition from one place to another. Most of life, I think, is spent in liminal spaces. One continuing transition. No simple black and white. No binary happy/sad.
When I finished those two walks, I got back in my car, called my wife, and asked her if she wanted some chicken tacos from Taco Stop, the excellent Mexican take-out window right conveniently located a few hundred yards from the Interstate entrance. She said “yes,” one of my favorite words ever, and I love to hear her say it.
I got on the Interstate and drove home.
The tacos were delicious.
Peace.
