This House Is Old
A little bit memoir, a little bit fiction, like all memoirs. An ode to my house, my family, and my neighbors. A panic in 2016.
This house is so old. It isn’t going anywhere.
At night, sometimes I hear the wind rattle the windows and imagine a straight line running from the end of the crack in the dining room wall to the bowed, water damaged gap in the century old wood floorplanks, splitting it wider into a broad v-shaped gash ripping up the wood along the grain all the way to the chipped, leaded glass window in the front porch, which shatters out into the street; that’s the line where the west wall will detach from the house and tip over, knocking down the dying sesquicentennial ash tree and landing next door, our bed sliding behind it and falling from the second floor, so we’ll be dead before the rest of the house collapses in on itself.
But this house is old. It’s been here a long time. Not as long as houses in Europe, but a long time. And it’s already on the west side of the Mississippi and it isn’t going anywhere.
The big French doors creak as my sister comes in. I’m putting some spackle on the wall in the kitchen. I’ll paint it later. My mother is picking the peas out of the carrots. She hasn’t done that before. When I was a kid, the peas and carrots could be on the same spoon. But now, they can’t.
Dad is going to help us build a fence, but only in the backyard because fences have two purposes, and I’m the one who has to come and go from this place for the next four decades, not him. I plan to stay in, mostly, and I don’t want to be lonely.
My sister has old photos she found in my parents’ house. My mom wants to get rid of them. We look at endless photos of my Grandfather in Libya, Egypt, Italy, so young and handsome in his uniform. “Take what you want. The rest I’m throwing away,” my mother says. I look at my Grandfather standing next to a downed Nazi warplane, smiling the broad smile of pride I would see four decades later sitting in the office of his factory. He didn’t shoot the plane down, but he was sure glad it came down. And then there he is in Rome, newly liberated from actual, for-real Fascists. My Grandfather, standing in front of the Colosseum; pieces are missing, but it’s still standing. It’s not going anywhere, but he is. “Take what you want. The rest I’m throwing away.”
Septuagenarians have no respect for their elders.
I take a spoonful of peas and a spoonful of carrots and put them in one pile on the side of my plate.
Most photos of my great-grandmother or her sisters are mine for the taking, though no one knows why I would want them. All she did was enable her alcoholic husband, my curators inform me. I glance at my sister. Our shared looks of confusion have gotten subtler in recent years: a quick tick of the eyebrow to reassure each other that we are in the same room. “A survivor of domestic abuse,” I say under my breath, and everyone acts like they didn’t hear me. “Didn’t she move to Saint Paul with her sister? They were tailors downtown when they were in their 20s, I thought” I say more loudly. “Milliners. They made hats.” “I thought she was a tailor, too. And then she took in laundry when he spent his paycheck at the bar.” “That might be right,” is the response.
Septuagenarians have no respect for their elders.
At night, sometimes I hear water pounding on the ground, dripping from the hole way up in the unreachable gutter. Then I hear it in the bathroom, but it’s dripping into the tub, so I run downstairs and it’s hitting the tiles in the entryway and there are three streams in the living room and four inches of standing water in the dining room and the kitchen cabinets are rotting away and the house is moving toward the river, picking up speed, moving toward the 1930s bungalow across the street, the one with our new gay neighbors—there are so many of us on this street, now—but their house is moving, too, toward the river, so we’re all going to fall over the bluff into the neighborhood that used to be where immigrants lived until their houses were torn down to put in factories because people a century after our house was built needed to have progress, progress, progress, and progress is factories, not houses that are occupied by unreal Americans, despite the water and the fact that factories flood, too.
And the history drizzles into the river, and it floats away to more interesting places, never to be referenced again in Minnesota because we don’t reference unpleasant history around here. Take your history someplace else and leave us alone. We will reference whatever we feel like referencing.
The factories will be replaced by condos, despite the water, but I won’t know because I’m in an old house that is going to fall over a cliff and get smashed to bits in front of the caves where bootleggers stored their booze in the 1920s, when great-great-aunt Ida lived down the street, and no one wants pictures of her. I just referenced that. Hi, Ida.
But this house is really old, not old like old houses in Europe, but old, and it’s not going anywhere. Those old houses in Europe stand there grandly, big and strong and old; they are only destroyed by something unthinkable, like a bomb or arson or neglect. This house is old. It’s not going anywhere.
Dad likes the garage. He thinks it’s solid, but he hasn’t seen the birds that circle it in the morning, making eye contact with me while I brew my coffee. They are preparing to pick it up and fly it to the river.
I ate my peas and carrots the wrong way, all akimbo and intermixed, but no one said anything. I walk my family to the front door and stand on the porch as my sister drives away to her daughters. I say goodbye to my parents before they head to their Southwestern playhouse. I notice a little piece of peeling paint on the exterior wall.
Maybe I don’t need to paint the kitchen. Maybe I can leave that strip of white spackle so I can remember where the crack was. This house is too old to go anywhere. That might be right. But septuagenarians have no respect for their elders, so it might be alternatively right.
This house is old. It is an American house. It is tired.