Today I took a drive out to the farm community where I lived until I married and began my life of moving around and making a new home many times over. My sister and I still own more than 500 acres of land and the farm house where our father was born and where we spent many days with his mother, our grandmother. The rolling hills looked a bit unkempt today since the last crop of corn has been cut and it’s not quite time for the spring plowing. The yard too looked forlorn with tree limbs askew and poke berry bushes invading the shrubs.
The long bronze key was stubborn in the lock, and persistent jiggling and turning finally made the door yield. This door is just one of three front doors since the house was built in stages over the years. In the early 1800’s two rooms over two rooms and a cellar were flanked by chimneys at each end of the house. From there the house grew in stages. First a step down for a hall, bedroom and porch facing the west and later more rooms rambled in the opposite direction. The kitchen moved from the cellar to a separate small building and then onto the main floor. Sometimes the living room and dining room traded places, another front porch and two small porches off the back joined in before bathrooms were thought of and added. So two back doors and three front doors ensured plenty of places to sit and talk and admire the views. In summer, we could count on a breeze coming over the hills, slipping under the tree branches and into one door and out another. Cold winter days called for closed heavy drapes and an eye on the wood stoves.
The house hasn’t been lived in for over ten years, and we have gradually sorted out the family papers and letters and taken the paintings and furniture that called the tenderest of our memories. The property is for sale now, and propspective buyers have little interest in a house that is architecturally funky and outrageously expensive to heat. For several years it seemed alive with my grandmother. I could open a desk drawer and find notes and prayers written in her hand. Her favorite chair was moved from its usual place, but it was as if her arm still rested on its arm. The bowls and cups in the kitchen were as familiar as the cans of Campbell’s Vegetable Soup that she heated and served me for Lunch on Saturday.
Today the house was quiet and smelled of dust and mold. Even the rooms with the most sun seemed bereft. I walked through each one, stopping for a moment to stroke an old pillow, pick up a book of poetry, finger the curved edge of a painted dresser. And then I walked out the same door I had unlocked to enter. It was the door closest to my grandmother’s bedroom, the room where she sewed and read and took her afternoon nap. And now she was truly gone.