Living in House, Childhood’s Ghosts

The Boston Herald

Not long after my parents moved from the house in which I grew up, I  took my son back to my old neighborhood. We walked up the flagstone walk my father built, climbed the concrete stairs where Janet Butler and I used to sit and dream away summer nights, and I rang the bell and asked if I could come in.

I expected everything to be the same. I wanted to show my son the red brick linoleum floor on which I used to play jacks, the knick-knack cabinet in the dining room, which my mother made me dust, the twin speakers my father installed in my bedroom, the patio where Rosemary and I used to put on talent shows. I wanted him to see me as a child and I suppose I wanted to glimpse again the child I was.

But the child I was didn't live there anymore. The house had changed. The red linoleum floor was gone. The refrigerator and stove my mother used to polish with Jubilee had been replaced by a bigger refrigerator and a fancier stove. The dining room was a den, the knick-knack cabinet a closet. My bedroom didn't look like my bedroom. Someone had come along and built a  closet and covered the speakers. The patio in the back yard, my small handprint in the concrete, my father's big one beside it, had been removed and the ground sodded.

I drove home that day feeling as ifl had lost something more than just the place where I had lived. I had lost my childhood. I knew with a sad finality that it didn't exist anymore, except within me.

My son spent the first five years of his childhood in a house we moved from 20 years ago. We didn't move far, just next door. A priest and his mother bought the house. The mother died years ago. The priest is packing up and moving next week. In 20 years that house hasn't changed a bit. It's still yellow, the color my husband and I painted it. The wrought iron is still black. The magnolia tree I got for my first Mother's Day, a twig then, gives shade now. All the trees are bigger, the roofs been replaced and the back yard is fenced in, but everything else is exactly as it used to be.

I hadn’t been inside in a long while and my visits there had always been brief: to drop off a book or some mail, to see some new drapes. But Father John called the other day and asked me to come over and see the just-polished floors. When he opened the door, I stepped right into my past.

It lives there, in the living-room wallpaper chosen when I was still a girl, in the kitchen shades I made to match the kitchen wallpaper, in the gold stove and refrigerator and countertop, in the garage turned into a family room, which my husband and uncle built, in the worn rug on which my children learned to crawl and then walk.

I painted the baseboards white as my son sat in an infant seat beside me. I bought the artificial greens, still in the family room, in a store in Randolph in the middle of a thunderstorm, Robbie in a stroller, Lauren in my arms. I taped lollipops to the trees in the back yard one sunny Easter morning. Father John led me through the house and showed me all that he was selling and giving away and what he was taking to his new house.

I tried to pay attention but I was more than 20 years removed. I was picking up Fisher Price letters that had fallen under the refrigerator. I was looking for a jar of Gerber meat sticks. I was scrubbing down the high chair and talking to Judy Long who was sitting at the kitchen table visiting. And writing down a phone number for the babysitter and building Lego cities and watching "Mr. Rogers" and cooking dinner and waiting for Daddy to come home.

It's all there, every moment. I see it. I hear it. I feel it. But I can't touch it. It's like a reflection in a mirror. I can't take it with me. I walk away and it is gone.

Soon, it will be gone forever. Someone new will move into the house and change the wallpaper and replace the blue rug and get rid of the old shades and throw away the plastic ivy, and the old ghosts will find other places to dwell.

Some will continue to dwell within me. But never again will they be all in one place and rush to greet me when I walk through a door.