Old Lady

One

She has been in our lives for almost forty years now, that is my whole lifetime. Gorgeous, large, red and green, lately more grey than green. But she has developed a smell. She is old, and sick, but how sick exactly, no one can really tell. We had her biopsied once, and the wood was all dry. But the smell persists.

The cooing of the doves is clearly audible all throughout the summer, when I have my old bedroom window open. I never actually see the birds, and can neither confirm nor deny their existence, for anything other than the sound. But lately, for the past ten years, they are always there. We think they live in the thick hawthorn hedge, somewhere.

In winter time, the radiators in almost every room are either off or on full blast, it is either or, because they are all broken, except the one in my parents’ room, and there are constant arguments over when we should turn on the heat from the boiler room switch. Will it suffice to have the heat on only in the morning, or in daytime, or should we have it on during the night, too? Older folks get cold easily, but younger ones thrive on a little cooler room temperature, and my room? Tiny as it is, I can grow palm trees there forty minutes after the heat has been turned on.

Two

I lived there my first nineteen years. Then again at twenty-one, briefly. Then again at twenty-five, a little longer this time. Then again at twenty-eight, again a shorter period. First, because I was the kid. Then, because I was between apartments for a month or so, before I moved to the Southeastern corner of our country to study creative writing.

The third stay was a sad stay, and due to shit hitting the fan in more than one areas in my life simultaneously. I reread all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes during that stay, let my hair grow. It rained all the time. I watched midnight reruns of McG’s short-lived action series Fastlane, felt incredibly sorry for myself, and munched on chocolate chip cookies and water crackers.

The fourth stay was based on some crazy idea of mine, that I would save enough money to start anew in another town. I was fed up with my surroundings and my own melancholia that seemed to oscillate around and from those surroundings, and the melancholia and closed-off-ness and neglect and sometimes out-and-out malice surrounding the town where was living. Sounds like I was living in Twin Peaks. But no, it was far from being that interesting. It was merely – uninspired. Or maybe it was just I, who was uninspired.

I, of course, never saved a dime, but boy, did my book collection and my DVD collection and my record collection need a much larger boat by the time I came to, and realized I was going nowhere fast the rate I was going, that I was this close to becoming another one of those adult kids, aplenty in the village as it is, who never grew their own wings and flew. Sure, I had flown, but coming back home with my tail between my legs wasn’t exactly considered an act of adulthood in any of the textbooks.

I moved out, the fourth, and, so far, final, time from that old house, not to the new town I had been thinking about, but just on my own. It would be my second to last year there, in let’s call it Depreston, but this fact was yet to be discovered. After that year, living far from the center of the town, walking the somewhat lengthy distance to work and back, causing my workmates to think I was crazy, getting a ride back home in my sister’s car every week to have our Sunday lunches there as a family, I did begin my preparations for leaving town. But melancholia is a guest not to be taken lightly, nor will she leave right away when she is told. The removal has to be done gradually and with sly planning, and it takes patience.

To date, I have moved eighteen times in my life, and every one of those times has taken place after my nineteenth birthday. I have mostly lived in apartments, but also in one rowhouse, the loveliest house I ever lived in, barring the Old Lady. That rowhouse no longer exists, it was torn down to create a peaceful landscape overlooking the river for the rich, who owned the huge manor across the street, with the chandeliers, and the Mercedes parked out front.

Now I am faced with the possibility that Old Lady will meet a similar fate, that she, for all intents and purposes, will be no more.

She has always been there, and has witnessed my entire childhood, as well as my very worst and vulnerable times as an adult, as well as some sunny and wonderful, gay old times, when the bad times were on hiatus.

Three

The sun shines on the terrace in the afternoon, and most of the evening, and the creepers and hops that climb the frame surrounding the space paint tropical shadows on my bare legs, as I curl up with a book in the swing, or the wooden lounger with extra padding, with my glass of wine, or cup of coffee next to me, and my cap, for when it gets so scorching I need to shade my eyes, and my journal, and all other necessary things a girl needs when she is reading on the terrace on a hot summer afternoon.

I read Mimesis by Erich Auerbach for my Literature studies there once, and whenever I spy the spine of the book in my book shelf, I remember reading it in the swing, with the temperature almost 30 Celsius, sweating, smoking after each chapter to soak it in, because I was a smoker then, and developing a reluctant but ever deepening love for the book on those long summer nights. I think I scored an A on the exam, and it was all because of the creepers and hops, and the wind chime I first hated but grew to love, and the bumblebees buzzing lazily in the flowerbed right next to the terrace, and the sound of the doves cooing every once in a while, coming from god knows where, perhaps from the hawthorn hedge, perhaps from the raspberry bushes.

The enormous yard, grass and moss, speckled with a couple of apple trees, lots of huge old birches, a silver willow, some pine trees, a wall of firs at the very back of the property that always makes me think of Agent Cooper, a maple by the entrance to the driveway. When I throw Frisbee with father in the summer, one of us always hits one of the apple trees, and we always conspire to never divulge this information to mother.

Four

The fact that the floor boards creak on certain places when someone is walking through the house, and sometimes without anyone walking anywhere, has been a huge inspiration for my early stories I wrote with my finest Stephen King hat on, when I was a young girl, horrible fan fiction, but we all have got to start somewhere, don’t we?

Also, the inner glass door in the back that sometimes jingles on its own, as if someone came in through the back door.

Also, the frogs, climbing up from the sewers, in the sauna.

Also, the darkness outside in the dark months, a darkness so unlike that of the city, and once I swear I saw a huge creature with red, gleaming eyes, just standing there, near the border of our yard, by the hedge, but it was dark and I’ll never be able to tell if it was there, or if I was just having one of my hyperactive imagination moments.

Like that one time I had to call my best friend to come over in the middle of the night, right before I moved out for the first time, and my parents were on vacation and I was alone in the house, and the power went out, and as I was smoking outside, on that same terrace that in summer months was full of warmth and safety, and happened to look inside through the living room window, I could have sworn I saw a person inside. I had my portable phone out with me, and was frozen in terror, so much so that my friend, who so did not live near me at all, got dressed, called a cab, and came over so that I wouldn’t have to be alone.

All my friends, childhood and otherwise, have enjoyed staying at my parents’. Our house has been the meeting place, the safe place, the brief haven in the shitstorms of our lives.

I have nursed my broken heart many a time in that house.

I have spent thirty-eight Christmases in that house.

I once even participated in trimming the hawthorn hedge, and got the pictures to prove it.

All the knowledge I have of my family is from and ends up inside that house.

The Old Lady has been kind enough to grant me sound sleep inside, even when I was in the deepest abyss of my insomnia. She has always given me that healing. In my bed there, I dream of dinosaurs, and nail polish, and my sister’s black Lab Jim. He loved the house, too, and he especially loved climbing into bed with whomever would let him. Because of mother’s asthma, we tried to be firm about the coming into bed, but you know how it is.

The Old Lady, scary as she sometimes might seem, has character, and will exorcise all demons, save for the restless spirit of the house herself.

The Old Lady is more an extension of myself than any other dwelling where I have ever resided.

Even with all my reverence for my new hometown for the past ten plus years, where my mother was born and lived until she married my father, the Old Lady is the place of power for me. Even if I now live in a building where my grandparents were living when I was a child, and hence now extremely well, and where I feel the second strongest connection to my life source, with Grandfather sometimes walking just behind me when I am getting my bike from the basement floor, or when I am crossing the yard to go for a walk by the lake and feel Grandmother was just there, hanging the laundry out to dry, even with this blessing, losing the Old Lady feels like I am going to lose the origin of my own spirit, my selfhood, my identity.

Five

Oh, come on. It’s just a house. (No. It never is, if one was happy there. I don’t care if it smells a little. The wood was dry. It was dry. All the inspections and studies, and we all know the wood was dry.)

When I have to tell her good-bye, I don’t know how I’ll do it. Is it a shallow thing, to love a house that much? Life does, after all, go on.

Tara. Howard’s End. Monk’s House. The Blue House in Coyoacán. Anaïs Nin’s house in Louveciennes, with every room painted a different color. 221 Baker Street. Lorelai’s house in Stars Hollow. Sookie Stackhouse’s grandmother’s old house. Rue Lamarck, Montmartre.