One thing I should NOT have done, on our trip to the East Coast last week: we drove by my childhood home in Connecticut.
The kids were unimpressed. They looked and said, "Uh-huh, nice," and went back to fighting in the back seat.
It's a typical New England
faux-Colonial four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath house, in a suburban development of similar houses, on about a third of an acre. We moved in on my fifth birthday, 1970, when the neighborhood was brand new. My parents sold it when I was pregnant with Big Son, in 1995, which was the last time I saw it.
The house is still white, as it's always been, but the black shutters and red door are now dark blue. The trees in back of the house have grown. When I was growing up, they weren't visible from the street, but now they tower over it, making the house and yard look much smaller. The little oak tree on the front lawn, next to what had been my grandmother's room, is now a big oak tree. A shrub my father planted is now a big pine tree growing right up against the house, that should probably be cut down or at least trimmed back.
The house seemed well-maintained but the lawn had some brown patches, and was a bit overgrown around the edges. My father would never have let it look like that. I knew, without even walking around to the back, that my grandmother's flowers were probably dead.
I so badly wanted the house to look exactly as I remember it looking. And, of course, I wanted my grandmother to be alive, and in the kitchen, taking some of her chocolate chip cookies out of the oven. I thought seeing the house again would bring her back, just a little bit, the way I could swear sometimes that I feel her next to me when I go to mass. But everything looked too different, and all it did was drive home the point that nothing is the same anymore. Houses change, trees grow, and people die and don't come back.
As we looked at the house, someone started closing the windows in what had been my grandmother's room. For some reason, this upset me -- maybe it's because I used to pull down her window shades every night. My grandmother worked the late shift, as a waitress at a Howard Johnson's, leaving around 4:00 pm and returning after midnight. Every night, before she came home, I would pull the shades down in her room for her, pull back her bed covers and leave a little note on her pillow -- "I love you," "Goodnight," etc. She was concerned I was wasting paper writing a new note every night, so I started using the same ones over and over. Years later, when my mother and I went through her things after she died, I saw that she had saved all of my notes -- and my grandmother was not the kind of person who usually saved things. It took us all of 20 minutes to clean out her stuff. (See post below -- my mother no doubt inherited her trait of getting rid of stuff from my grandmother, though it should be noted that my grandmother never pressured me to get rid of any of MY stuff.)
Hub was surprised that after coming all that way, I didn't even want to get out of the car. I asked him to drive away, because I didn't want to cry in front of the kids and have to explain why.
Last year, my brother took his son to see the house, and knocked on the door, and the new owners were nice and let him walk through it. I had no desire to do this.
The garage door had been open when we drove by, and I thought I recognized some of the posters. I asked my brother about this later.
"Yeah," he said, "They still have our Star Wars poster, and our
Yastrzemski poster."
I remember my father hanging up those posters, when I was a little girl. Now I'm a middle-aged woman. My little brother just turned 40 -- for some reason, that was more unbelievable than turning 40 myself a few years ago.
Anyway, I doubt I'll ever go back again, and I'll try not to think too much about what I saw last week. I want to remember the house the way it was, and all of the happy memories there -- and try to make this sad feeling go away.
