Grandin Road

I am sitting alone in my sexy red minivan, holding a poppy seed bagel covered in salmon cream cheese and topped with tomato, capers, and onions. The car seat behind me is empty, and the children’s nursery rhyme CD has been retired to my CD holder. The air inside is warm and quiet, and I settle and stretch into this silence like it is a bed.

After awhile, the silence is too much, it seems almost unnatural and so between bites of my bagel and with small bits of onion and capers falling around me, I pick up my cell phone to call my mom in Virginia. She always sounds happy to talk to me, and in a moment, she is there, on the phone. We talk of nothing, of the weather, of my baby’s newest antics. The kind of talk that is comforting and familiar. Then, out of the blue, she says this: “A friend of ours was just telling me yesterday how we should sell the house on Grandin Road. It is tough for your father to manage the stairs, and there are way too many repairs.” She slides this into the conversation carefully. Disguises it because she knows that I hate change, small change, like when she rearranged our family’s living room, and painted the exterior of the house “Charleston grey,” which is, if you are unaware, actually black. I listen. If anyone passes the car, they see my eyes wide, my lips pressed together tightly. I look like I have just been given shocking news.

My mom, who knows all of my subtleties, immediately follows the silence with “You know, home is where the heart is, wherever we are, you will have a home.” Still, I say nothing. I am transported to the fateful day when I left home as a young adult. My mom sat me down and said, “Tomorrow, when you leave, you will begin a whole new phase of your life. It is exciting and scary. You will succeed, and you will make mistakes. Maybe even big mistakes- but remember this: I love you no matter what, and you can always come home, always.” It’s funny because this memory is one of my favorite and perhaps the most influential in my life. As a parent, I wonder, do you know these moments when they happen? But what I really begin to ponder as I pull from this memory and back into my car, is home just the people or is the place important too?

I personify inanimate objects, always have. I have named trees and windows and chairs. When I move, I feel lost for a while, and wander aimlessly feeling I have misplaced something. Feeling almost like someone has died- I hate to go back. I almost never will drive by the house or apartment where I once lived. It saddens me, and I have always had trouble explaining why. I picture the rooms filled with strange furniture, clothes with unfamiliar smells invading closets that were mine. I remember dinners, arguments, and conversations in that space, and somehow it is transformed into something sacred. It is as if the very walls and floors have soaked up all those words, all that breath, even my dreams.

So, to entertain, even for a moment, losing a home that has been a part of my life for over twenty years, made it difficult to draw my breath. I think of all the moments when I have pulled in front of that grand old house from states as far away as Mississippi. A part of my heart always settles, breathes a sigh of relief. I stare up at the windows; I know each one so well. My mom’s room, my old room, I can almost make out my 16 year old face, peering desperately through the curtains into a chilly winter’s night listening for the straining roar of my first boyfriend’s pale blue VW. I stood there listening. He was supposed to deliver a present to me and never came. I look at the walk, framed with boxwoods leading to the front door, and I swear I still can see my friend, Laurel and I rushing by them after the Woodrow Wilson Junior High School Dance. We are laughing and talking all the way up the walk, and my mom is waiting in the kitchen to hear everything. She listens attentively to all the details. Strange, I don’t think either Laurel or I even danced with anyone, but we had plenty to say just the same. We noticed everything, and my mom, God bless her, acted interested as long as we spoke.

That beautiful old front door is more like a tree than a just a door. It is streaked and cracked and dark. It resembles the face of a weathered old man. Where it is cracked, right near the center, a sliver of light is sliced onto the floor, and I wonder if that door holds the memories inside the wood. The comings and goings of all of us through the years- We have all changed, but that door is the same, and it is that sameness that gives me comfort. To me, home is stability and solidity, a place where memories can accumulate. In a way, the house becomes a part of us, and we become a part of the house.

In the basement, behind two doors, is a secret room. Okay, not really secret, more hidden than anything else. It used to be the coal room, and my father now builds model ships, planes, and boats in there. It used to be just full of storage. It is concrete and cold, and I have always loved how the air smells like the many years never passes but stayed there and just made room for the others. On the door is a yellowed piece of paper, from 1950, if I remember correctly. It is a notice for some sort of home inspection, and after all these years, it has never been torn down, never. It still is there on that door, and I have often snuck down just to see it. Some people would call its continued presence messy or cluttered, but I know better. It is part of the history, the soul of that house, and when I think of a new family tearing it down and casually throwing it into the garbage; it pierces something inside of me.

And Christmases…all those Christmases, some of them white, all of them cold, but that house gleams like a bride on her wedding day. The trees, Mom usually puts up at least two, are always amazing, and not for expensive baubles. The main tree is full of the ornaments we girls made as children. You know the ones, the Santa made from a piece of an egg crate and cotton, the bird made from a clothespin, all cherished enough to still adorn the tree after all these years. All of sitting in front of the fire with the Christmas lights glowing, carols from the piano- I think of my Aunt Lila, how her laughter, deep and bubbling, filled that room to capacity, and I imagine that house still holds that laughter somewhere.

Every corner of that house is known to me, every smell. There are stains on the ceiling, stacked cookbooks in the downstairs kitchen closet, old make-up in drawers. There are forgotten barbies behind bookcases, and hidden dental reminders under heaters. There is the spot of my first kiss and my first break-up, and those old walls have seen it all, have been witness to all that joy and all that pain, the loss, the new life. That house on Grandin is steeped in everything I have ever felt was true, and it is still filled with the people I have loved all these years, between those Virginia mountains and under a great sky. And even in Atlanta, I see that sky and bask underneath it in my own home with my own husband and child. But, I still feel the presence of that house on Grandin Road waiting for me to come back or at least write, and now that I put all of this down on paper, I realize that a real home is more like a person than a house, and maybe I am just not ready to say goodbye.