This Old Home

During those final days of summer when the sun played across our skin, but the muck of the humidity was too strong to manage, my mother and I would drive through the back roads — a/c blasting on our dewy skin and country music floating on the chilled currents — while she gazed in longing at the large farm homes and I dreamt of flying as high as the crows in the sky. It became an unspoken tradition, us together in that car. The rest of the family at home, not understanding the novelty we felt, imagining the lives of others inside the windows that grew brighter and clearer as the summer sun lay to rest in billowy blankets of lavenders, coral, and rust. Every time, my mother would stop in front of her favorite house and say to me,

“We’re going to live there someday.”

Then we would smile and sit in silence as she organized the furniture in her mind, and I would draw with my eye a tire swing hanging from the front tree and dogs running after each other into the field beyond.

The night before I left for college, she beckoned me into the car where we took that familiar ride into the streets behind the woods. Over the years, some houses had come down and others built in their place; a few new barns added to the prosperous properties and the ashen remains of the unlucky ones beginning to grow over with weeds. But her favorite one remained towards the end of the road. We sat in front of the dream house and rested in each other’s comfortable silence. It wasn’t until the next evening when I was unpacking my final box in my dorm room, I realized my mother hadn’t said her ritualistic fantasy out loud.

I lay in bed and thought about that country home, how pristine it was as a child, and the ways it changed as I grew; the vines climbing up the façade and marking its face with age, just as the wrinkles grew from the corners of my mother’s eyes and sprouted from her smile when she laughed; or the shingles that would go missing from the roof after a nasty storm, just like the greys from my mother’s hair would disappear after a trip to the salon. Did she ignore the way the house began to dip into its sagging foundation? And was she ever startled by the aging stranger reflected in her rearview mirror?

About 10 years later, when I was so lost in the world of my adulthood that I could barely remember the child I was, my father called to say my mother had fallen ill. I rushed to the hospital to be by my mother’s side, but we were eventually pushed into the waiting room by the bustling nurses who said there was nothing we could do as my mother rested, except for us to do the same. Our solemn caravan made it home and we packed ourselves back into our old rooms — greeted by sagging mattresses and familiar creaky floorboards — and waited. By the time the moon settled in the sky, I was riddled with restlessness. I took my old bicycle from the garage and pedaled absently across the leaf-covered streets, and although I arrived there without intention, I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see that dream house in the distance.

What once sat high on a pedestal of perfection was now rundown and broken almost beyond recognition. The bright white clapboard siding that burned into my memory as a child had chipped away and was as yellowed as decaying teeth. The elegant vines no longer traversed the sides absentmindedly, but choked the gutters in their vice and blocked out the windows. The house had aged into something almost completely unlike the dreamy abode it started as, when the clean windows twinkled with the lights and life of its interior. At that moment I wished to be 7 again, sitting in the cool cabin of my mother’s car and dreaming of the future. But the future had come, and now I could only see the past. But in my reverie, a light flickered on inside the darkening home and cast away the shadows, and inside I saw the warmth its family had created over the generations and knew then that no matter how aged the home may seem, it was still the same home that filled the dreams and past of mine and my mother’s youth.