My grandparents’ house sat on a small hill overlooking a thin stretch of river below. I mostly remember being bored there, and dreading whenever my mother made us go and visit.
They had an old, docile German Shepherd named Jake who, against my adolescence, felt generally bigger than me (spiritually as well; he had seen it all).
I can still recall the slight mustiness of Jake’s warm fur, the smell of dust in the house, the lace tablecloths and translucent curtains in my grandmother's room, and the big vinyl blow-up heart in my grandfather’s room.
Their furniture had lived with them for what I assume was most of their lifetime, dragged with them as they moved, so all of it had that ecstatic ugliness of history.
There was a record player-radio hybrid in their family room that always played classical music. I remember lying on the carpeted floor in a sleeping bag in that room, knowing my mother was asleep in the guest bedroom across from my grandfather’s, while my grandmother slept in the room adjacent to me. The boredom I experienced there felt terminal. I wanted to be anywhere else. I wanted to be entertained.
I’m not sure when it started, but at some point, these memories began to resurface with a strange clarity in my adulthood. Their house and its transfixing stillness had, unbeknownst to me, been saved as a seed in my memory - and was nourished by the water of time. I began having flashbacks of the house in my twenties - not just of the house, but of the overwhelming sense of security it held for me. I could still inhabit it in my mind, in a way that other places, even those I thought of as foundational to my history, I can hardly remember beyond their impressionistic streaks. My grandparents’ house by the river, however - preserved in amber.
Whenever I feel scared, or hopeless, or when I just want to know I can still feel, I go back to their house. I go back to that boredom… sleeping across from Jake’s giant body, the smell of dust, the sound of the refrigerator humming in the kitchen… and a peace blooms in my heart. I hear the classical vinyls being played, the strange red tile in the basement that seemed so otherworldly, and when your feet touched that freezing cold tile you could look out the sliding glass doors and see the passage of river below.
I had no idea that it would mean anything, and this seems to be the mysterious way of the material world: things are constantly nothingness pregnant with something.
The discontent I felt in that house is now funny to me. How desperate I was to escape it, and now, it’s my willed haven. A refuge I can return to that feels as real as today. But this clarity only came later, long after the house was gone from our lives. By the time I started to remember what it held, my grandparents had already moved on from it, first into smaller, dimmer places, and then out of this life altogether. So I never got to share with them how safe I felt there.
The interstitial space between things, where connections are formed, are, I think, what I am most interested in. Time, memory, scent, emotion… these strange, unknowable materials deposit like stalactites in the cave of our being, constructing the fucked up, jagged architecture we come to know as our life. And yes, they help us make sense of things…but they also become a way back - a portal to a world that no longer exists, where my grandmother is sleeping in the bedroom off the family room, and I’m lying awake in a sleeping bag before the floral sofa.
xo,
David
