A Trip to an Old Home
It had been five months since I was accepted into a four year university, about eight months since the beginning of my senior year of high school, and almost twelve years since my father left me and my family for Georgia. I always tie the memory of my father with the memory of my first childhood home. Whenever I think of my father, I always think of losing things. Losing the idea of safety, losing our sense of sanity, and losing that house. The event of my father deserting my family has always been a burden on my childhood because although I had a great time growing up with my mom and younger brother, I’ve always had odd, quiet outbursts of anxiety and sadness. It was something that I had made a part of my identity as a child and something that I thought would haunt me and define me for the rest of my life. Although I tried to wear that fact in shame—trying to hide it as best as I could—my mom wore it like a badge. She was much more braver than I had ever been when accepting it. She would retell the story and make periodic visits to check up on the old house that we had lost. I was going to be going to college soon, so my mom planned one last visit for me.
The house in which I spent the first few years of my life in was a little bit of a drive from the area where I spent most of my childhood. Although Syracuse and Liverpool are close, I have little recognition of the city and more connection with the partial-suburban-partial-rural area. As my mom and I drove through the west side of the city, I took note of the familiar route and the less familiar scenery of overturned trash cans, cold grey pavements, and odd patches of green in the sidewalk cracks.
“Let’s see how much the house has changed.” My mom said as she drove down a street passing many other brutally treated homes.
“Should be interesting.” I wasn’t thrilled, yet I wasn’t completely opposed to revisiting the old house. A great part of me wanted to let go of the memory, but another part of me was curious. It was that curious part that held onto the memory and refused to let go. I was more like my mother than I’d like to admit.
As we took a final turn, we didn’t pull into our old drive way in fear of ruining our tires; the drive way was full of shattered glass, small dapples of potholes, and scattered, miscellaneous shards of clutter. Near the driveway was the big blue and white house from a long ago memory. All the windows were ether broken or covered in wooden panels. The paint was noticeably chipped all along the sides; White revealing a brown undercoat. The entire front lawn was a mixture of an abused, neglected brown and a sad, hopeful yellow-green. The fence along the side was beaten down and could no longer contain the wildness of the old backyard. From the car window, I could see that the glass-crusted front porch was reformed into an urban shack. On the front door beyond the porch was a slip of pink paper. The old house had been abandoned for the final time.
“I’m glad this place went to shit!” my mom let out a heavy, hearty laugh. She was proud of our work. Although we did cause destruction to the house before we left, what has been done to further destroy it was seemingly out of our control. But my mom and I would always joke that we curse every house we live in. She cursed this one specifically so that no one else could ever enjoy the property.
“It looks like our curse worked.” I laughed along, though my laugh was softer and more breathy than my mom’s, “That’s why you never mess with witches.”
I’m glad that we were eventually able to make light of the past. It made everything a little more digestible and was one of the only things that kept my mom in one piece. We now knew that no one was living on the property, so for the first time since living there, we got out of the car to look around. We weren’t looking for anything, but maybe hoping that an old piece of lost innocence would find us.
As I stepped onto the deserted porch leading to the house’s interior, I could remember what it was like to be inside. There was a kitchen where my mom would show me magazines, a front room where I would “write” plays for my brother and I to perform, a living room where I had kept my childhood books and where I would try to teach my brother to read, and a staircase that lead to the old bedrooms. The only things that slept in my bedroom now was probably stray cats and rabid mice. Seeing the mangled interior reminded me of what my mother and I had done before abandoning the house for the first time.
The stripping paint reminded me of the cave drawings on my bedroom walls. My mom wanted the house destroyed, so she let me draw on the walls with nails. I believe that I carved rough sketches of cats, birds, some trees, and a couple moons. It was like drawing in markers but better. The scratches, scars, and engravings were more permanent. The decomposed wall paper brought back the memory of my mom spray-painting the walls. The wall-paper had been a gift from my grandmother. She didn’t want anyone else to have it. Somewhere inside the house, hidden under a snag of carpet or in some lone, forgotten crevice was my mom’s wedding ring.
“What do you see in there?” My mom called from the front yard.
“Nothing much.” I replied. There was nothing in the house but glass and ghosts. I made my way off the porch and reunited with my mom. She started walking around the house and towards the backyard.
“Come on, let’s see what the back looks like.” She urged me to follow.
“Are you sure we’re allowed?” I remembered the pink slip of paper, “What if we get caught, or what if there’s a stray dog or homeless people or something?”
“Alyssa,” my mom sounded oddly stern, “you’re fine. There’s nothing here.”
I hesitantly followed my mom. We’ve always had a strange, yet close, relationship. At times my calmer personality would have to guide my mom with advice. At other times, her boldness would have to push me out of my comfort zone. We were both cautious and bold in our own ways. We both pushed each other and had our own special kind of wisdom to share. If she was a cup of black coffee, I would grow up to be a latté. We complemented each other for as long as I can remember. So I followed her to the backyard.
The yard was no longer a yard. It looked as if after years of humanity and civilization’s neglect, the backyard turned it’s face back to Mother Nature to repent. Unlike the front yard, the backyard was full of overgrown grass, thick, braided weeds, spontaneous floofs of wild flowers, and plant-life over taking all things man-made.
“It looks like it returned to nature.” I said as we looked as the tangles mess of plants.
“Crazy.” She walked a little ahead of me and then pointed towards the back of the yard,
“That’s where we had the pool, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember the axe too.”
Taking the axe to the pool was one of my most vivid childhood memories. The pool I believe was one of the first things we tried to destroy. My mom taught me how to hold the axe safely with her and together we swung at the above ground pool. We made gashes in its sides and in the deck surrounding it. She even let me take a few swings by myself. It wasn’t my fondest memory, but it was one of my most vivid.
As my mom took her time looking at what had been our shed, I took my own little walk around the yard. Over along the fence separating the old house from one of its neighbors was a flash of orange-yellow. It was the brightest color among the sea of green grass and weeds. I followed it to find that bushes of beautiful tiger lilies had grown in patches along the side of the old yard. I don’t remember there ever being bright orange lilies in my childhood.
“Mom!” I called out, “Look at these flowers, they’re beautiful!”
“I know,” she smiled as she walked over, “We used to have a little garden, remember.”
“I remember the garden, but I don’t remember ever seeing the flowers.”
I have vague memories of my mom planting small quantities of vegetables in the back yard: peppers, beans, cucumbers, and a watermelon that may or not be imaginary. I had many fond memories in the backyard with my tiny brother, my mom, a big German shepherd dog, and small, flickering, disillusioned memories of my father. But, for some reason, my mind never allowed me to remember the flowers that my mom claimed to have been there the entire time. But they had been there. Those yellow-orange lilies had been somewhere hiding in the background of my childhood. Somehow, when everything else from my childhood at the old house died and became cursed with age, the flowers were allowed to survive.
I touched the flowers’ petals. They were soft and smooth, beautiful and wild; They were everything that the old house and my ghosting memories were not. It amazed me that such untamed beauty could grow from such negative energy and destruction. I went through my entire childhood believing that the past could never result in anything positive. We were abandoned, we destroyed the house, and we harbored disgust and unresolved emotions for years. But the grass kept growing, the weeds continued to sprout, and these tiger lilies beat all odds. The flowers took all the terrible things that the world threw at them and then created something new and wonderful. If nature could return to its own untamed beauty and wildness, perhaps, so could I.
Before we left our final visit to the old house, I picked a couple of the orange lilies. I liked flowers, and these seemed to be the perfect souvenir. After a few weeks, the flowers would die and shrivel up into brown-gray before turning into dust. But at least I could enjoy them for a short while. When I picked the flowers, though, I knew that an old, lost part of myself died. The old child in me turned her face to death and was finally welcomed home. Her death was long overdue. It was time for her leave me, and it was time for me to move on.
