Farewell to the Animal House

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.

And finally, as we begin to take down the maps from the walls, fill boxes with books, and look around at the traces of the life that we’ve had here, we had one last four-legged guest.  We arrived home one Sunday evening to a rabbit, lounging in our living room.  I didn’t believe Weston when he told me, but then I heard the skittering of paws on our hallway floor, and found tiny bits of scat all around the house.  A trail of where he’d been all day, depositing little hints that he’d been in the pantry, the kitchen, on the couch, down the stairs of the basement.  We got him out the humane way, through the cellar door back into wild world where he belongs, with all the other animals that might eventually knock on these doors or slip through the cracks in the inviting walls.  Unfortunately, we won’t be here to greet them.