Foundations remain constant

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

The house I grew up in has changed hands again. I saw the new owner standing in the yard as a friend and I drove past. I do this sometimes, drive by to look and to remember.

My father paid $ 10,000 for this house in 1954. The new owner paid $ 280,000. But the house isn't just more expensive. It's changed in many ways. It's bigger. One of the owners built on and up. And because of this, the yard is smaller. The trellis is gone, along with the rose bushes my mother planted and coaxed to grow. And the sprawling, silvery spidery things that lined the front walk have disappeared, as have the shrubs that separated our yard from the neighbor's, my mother's rock garden and the green awnings she scrimped and saved for.

Even the color of the house is different. And yet it is still, every bit of it, my old house.

The day I brought my friend by, I looked at the front steps and smiled. They were as they have always been, not a single brick replaced. I could see me standing next to my grandmother in my First Communion dress, posing for a picture. And I could see Janet Butler and me in our Brownie uniforms, and my dog, Buttons, asleep by the door, and Jimmy Tape smoking a cigarette on a winter's night, the smoke and his breath making the same white whirls.

Years ago, before these new owners but long after my family moved out, I got a tour of my old house. I expected to see what I'd left - the same linoleum kitchen floor, knick-knacks on the built-in dining room shelf, speakers in the walls, a pattern in the hardwood floor.

But none of these things remained.

The kitchen was new. The dining room was a family room. The hardwood floor was carpeted. And the walls where my gather had installed radio speakers had been torn down. The only thing the same was the bathtub.

This bothered me then. It doesn't now. Because I realize that everything changes and that I've changed, too, and that if my old house were to visit me, it would have to squint and struggle to see past the woman I am to the girl I was.

The girl I was, after all, was just a girl. She sipped milk through a flavor straw for breakfast and ate Hostess snowballs for lunch and had to be reminded to comb her hair. She read comic books and loved dolls and pop beads and playing Monopoly and jacks on the floor and scheming and dreaming with her best friend, Rose.

The girl I was was so out of it that she sang herself to sleep, thinking that a closed door closed out not just light but sound too.

I wonder: Did my old house recognize me the day I came to visit? Or did it see an older stranger with a younger one? And if it did recognize something familiar in that older stranger, did it wonder why she wasn't playing Jacks on the kitchen floor or Monopoly in her bedroom?

A few days ago, I stood at my kitchen window transfixed by the birds at the feeder. And I thought, when did this happen? When did I start caring about birds? And buying bird food and bird books?

A house gets new walls and new floors and new landscaping and it shrinks and it grows at the same time. That's true for people, too. We are, at our foundations, who we've always been. But we're different, too. We stop reading comic books and eating Hostess snowballs and playing games. And start watching birds. We grow up. We grow older. We develop new interests. We change.

Rose and I meet for dinner these days. We sit and talk over wine and a meal and maybe a little more wine. We talk about books and movies and our kids and their kids. Last week we talked about the kinds of birds that come to our feeders.

And I thought how our friendship is a lot like the house I grew up in. It looks different, but in the most important ways it is what it always was.

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