We first moved in to the 120-year-old red stone house in
January, the acre lawn in front of it white with snow. To welcome us, the steam radiators
banged, hissed, and clanged. The
basement, dark and dank, seemed to breathe upward into the house. Faded orange and green wallpaper from
the 1940’s led through the foyer and up the spiral staircase into the second
floor. Nobody had lived here for
at least a year. The rooms echoed
as we placed boxes in them, books in the dining room, paintings in the living
room, a few pots and pans in the pantry.
Upstairs, we couldn’t decide which of the three rooms to sleep in. There
were too many rooms to fill up with our few belongings, but the house filled up
soon enough on its own.
The first time I did laundry in the basement, as I fished
the last pair of socks and boxers from the bottom of the washing machine, I
found a dead bat, wet and clean and folded peacefully among our clothes. Another one appeared in a bag of salt
for the driveway, and a few more, these ones very alive, could be heard making
love under our staircase while we ate dinner.
The expected spider here and there reminded us of the
house’s age, and of our location under tall trees and vast stretches of
grass. The cold feeling and slight
awareness of ghosts began accompanying me as I placed the dishes into the
cabinets. I assumed that in a
house this old, there must be visitors from the afterworld, and I found them
rather friendly. Invisible company
while I was alone for hours on end in this quiet winter in this enormous house.
When the weather started to get warmer, the ants
arrived. We came downstairs to
thousands of them, following one another in perfect lines, coming from holes in
the walls we hadn’t noticed before, across the kitchen floor, up the sides of
the cupboards, in the deep sink.
So, we cleaned up all of our crumbs and wiped down all of our
countertops, and crossed our fingers.
The next morning, the sun shone on even more thin black lines, moving
quickly and criss-crossing the white surfaces of the kitchen. Eventually, we busted them all with
boric acid, but now our kitchen seems so … empty.
And then, the animals we became, when a spring thunderstorm
would wrap itself around us, wet, loud and crashing. When we were slowly surrounded by night and darkness, when
we were slowly surrounded by our own beasts, crawling out from within, our real
selves falling to pieces like shedding fur or molted skin. At times, it was like looking into a
mirror side by side, finally seeing our reflections. Those times are gone now. They were necessary, to tuck into the pockets of our
relationship, to read in past diaries when we’re older.
With the onset of summer came our next guest: the
woodchuck. Weston found him under
the front porch while gardening in the yard. He aptly named him Woody, and
though I have never seen him, and fear the Dickens might be scared right out of
me if I do, I know he’s still there, drinking last sips from empty PBR cans
behind the lattice and watching out for intruders.
Amber dropped the kittens off for a weekend while she was
away. One black one, Lucy, and one
gray one, Charlie. Someone else
apparently named them after my cousins.
We tried to contain them in the library, a big space they could roam and
play and read Harry Potter at their leisure. Within a half hour, though, they escaped, wanting
desperately to be near us, wanting desperately to explore. Attacking one another every chance they
got. Attacking our noses with the
smell of their litter box.
