What’s Left Behind

The house, in its better days

“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
― Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes

When out for a drive almost anywhere one is likely to see dilapidated and abandoned homes, sitting lonely and forgotten. Windows missing, holes in the roof, porch boards broken, overgrown with vines and weeds. Maybe you don’t notice them much; maybe you imagine one or another of them to be haunted. Maybe you see them and cluck your tongue at the absentee owners who have left the house rot. Maybe you ponder the home’s grander days and the families who may have once rested their heads within its now-decaying walls.

In roughly 1900 to 1905, my great-grandfather, Lewis, and his brothers built a neighborhood. They constructed several homes on a street in what was, at that point, a boom town. Lewis moved in to the one at the crest of the hill, where he and his wife raised their 5 daughters and 2 sons. The youngest son inherited the house and he and my grandmother raised my father and aunt there. In the 1970s they constructed an addition to the house where my grandmother operated a “beauty shop” for a few years before circulatory problems forced retirement.

The upstairs was filled with other people’s stuff. In every generation of our family who passed through, there were people who left things behind for safekeeping. Things they did not have room for in their own homes but which were not trash. Two bedrooms and two small attics full of things. Clothes, furniture, knick-knacks, books. There was a trunk in one attic with a padlock on it that no one wanted to break. I never did find out what’s in there.

Grandma’s house was my happy place as a child, as is the case for many people; grandparent magic is a known phenomenon. I spent nearly every weekend there, from Friday evening to Sunday night. She was my refuge from the tumult of my home with my parents. Even as a little girl I understood this was Our House, built by our family and lived in by our family. I begged my grandma to never sell, and please leave it to me when she was gone. I couldn’t bear the thought of it falling into someone else’s hands.

She kept that in mind. When she passed at 92, the house went to my father and to me. By then, I had moved three hours away with no intention of ever returning except to visit. My dad had his own house out in the country, where he preferred to stay. Having grown up a little, I thought about renting the house out. Maybe it would be ok for others to live there, so long as it was still ours? But when I tried to talk to my dad about it, he shut down. He angrily refused to discuss it.

And so, the house sat, still chock full of furniture and belongings. Years passed. I had to argue long and hard with my dad to get the key so I could at least go in and get the one piece of furniture I wanted, the secretary desk. That was in about 2010, I think. And that’s the last time I was inside. It has sat there unoccupied, unattended, for all this time. Occasionally I’d try to broach the subject of what to do with it to my dad, with the same gruff and angry reply. As half-owner, I could’ve forced the situation if I wanted to. But it’s complicated with him, and suffice to say I lacked the emotional wherewithal to stand up to him about it. And so, the house sat.

I asked my mom if they ever checked on the house. Sure, she said. I drive by once in a while.

The thought of the house, empty and neglected, weighed on me. It hurt my heart and put a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had a vague sense of all the bad things that were probably happening to the abandoned house that featured so prominently in my best childhood memories. But I also had my own house, demanding career, husband, and two children. It simply couldn’t make it to the top of my list of priorities. Out of sight, out of mind, except when it wasn’t. I paid the taxes every year and tried not to think about it too much.

I don’t know what changed for my dad this year. Maybe just the salve of time. But a few weeks ago, someone called him about purchasing the property and he was finally willing to consider it. When he told me, several things happened simultaneously: tears of sadness in my eyes, a certainty that it was time to let go, and an undercurrent of relief. I even allowed myself to think my share of the profit might help me toward my goal of buying a bigger house than I have now.

It’s too late, though. Daylight is pouring in through the roof in more than one place. Thick trees have taken root right up against the foundation. And worst of all, people have been in the house. It has been ransacked by someone who thought maybe they’d find a cache of hidden treasure or something worth pawning. It’s unlikely they found anything worthwhile, which is maybe why they set about destroying everything they could get their hands on instead. Furniture has been busted into pieces. Dishes thrown like frisbees. Glass cabinet fronts shattered. Holes in the walls. Filth everywhere. The investor who hoped he’d found a gem has now offered to try to sell it for us in hopes we might get $15,000 for it.

That sounded ridiculous at first; the lot itself must be worth that much. “Not when you consider the cost of tearing down the house that’s on that lot,” argued the potential buyer. He pointed out the age of the house and the likelihood of asbestos, which requires a certain, expensive expertise to remove.

I was skeptical, but have come to believe he is being honest. The living room where I sat with my grandma watching Golden Girls and eating ice cream floats, the dining room where she sat and shuffled her deck of cards for game after game of solitaire, the bathroom countertop she sat me on to wash my hands before dinner, the mysterious “upstairs” full of decades of family paraphernalia, none of it is worth anything to anyone except to my own sentimental nostalgia.

This house, where I went to leave behind the yelling and unhappiness that so often marked my childhood and instead inhabit, for a few days at a time, warmth and endless kindness and understanding, is worthless. My grandmother granted my wish that the home be entrusted to my care, and I let it go to ruin.

In my mind, I can travel through every inch of that house and see it clearly. The front porch with its metal glider where grandma and I watched the neighborhood. The porch light switch by the front door, an odd push button type I’ve never seen elsewhere. The rough, beige drapes that cover the entire wall, not just the window, in the back of the living room. A large clay pot on the side of the steps that lead upstairs. The unbelievably loud, colorful and ugly carpet in the dining room, a flea market find installed when I was very young. The linoleum underneath, large red and green squares. The kitchen pantry where the broom and mop hang. The shelves in the small hallway between the dining room and the beauty shop. The drawers next to the refrigerator, bread stored in the second from top. The decorative scalloped-edge wood trim over the double kitchen sink. The small back porch with its rusting black railing. Two closets in the downstairs bedroom, one his and one hers, and the vanity in between. Threadbare green carpet, replaced in the living room and reinstalled in the bedroom. The 70s-era rotary phone on the wall next to where the secretary desk stood. Baseboards, drop ceilings, textured walls.

I can smell the basement, her “Tabu” dusting powder, the lingering permanent wave solution scent in her shop. I can hear the sound of the folding door leading to the shop and the sound of her deck of cards shuffling against the table. The clinking of her spoon, stirring Sweet’n’Low into her china coffee cup.

I think about the 8 or so decades that came before me in that home, the many children who grew up there who would be my ancestors. The family was big back then; there were parties and get-togethers and Sunday dinners, siblings and spouses and cousins. I know there were deaths there, but it has never been a place that felt haunted. It’s just the place where we came from and it no longer exists as I knew it.

I don’t think my grandma would be upset with me for what has become of her home. She would understand. She always understood. She would be proud of the life I have, even though it kept me from doing right by the house. My dad and I have agreed to just be grateful we aren’t having to pay for its demolition, and accept whatever we can get from it. But the truth is that everything of real value that place had to give, everything worth taking from it, is already with me.