DEAR DEEDEE:
SAFE AS HOUSES
West Coast
Saturday, Nov. 2
Dear DeeDee,
“Houses live and die,” T.S. Eliot observed, but in humid kudzu country in between they decay. A common enough sight in the community: houses falling in on themselves, choked by vines, stripped of humans, reclaimed by nature. “Left to rot,” as your grandparents described the breach—not with admiration. But those dilapidated outposts as playgrounds? Terrific fun. My bicycle gang was addicted. Abandoned houses = open houses. A two-pronged adventure, really: wheeling through an obstacle course of weeds and yard stumps to carouse interiors that barely were, holes in the walls and floorboards, swinging banisters, splintered steps. My best booty find was a pottery jug, missing just a chink of its lip, but I left it where it leaned because to cart home another old something? Why? Amazing that none of us broke legs or arms or punctured ourselves. More amazing: none of us wigged out over the ghost menace or thought twice about disturbing the maybe-not-entirely-departed dead with our marauding. Given the suggestibility of children, alert to every wrong wind and seeded silence, that aspect seems most puzzling to me now. But maybe any kid’s universe is too full of the new and novel to accommodate much else. Or am I misremembering?
Love,
Aunt K
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West Coast
Sunday, Nov. 3
Dear DeeDee,
By talking tumble-downs I’ve probably given credence to the notion that your dad and I grew up in some kind of farming refugee camp. To set the record straight(er): three houses in the vicinity were listed on the National Register of Historical Places. Compared to the Thirties clapboard and Sixties brick that sprung up around them, those three classified as the community’s grandees, though no native viewed them with anything approaching wonder. They were houses. People lived in them. End of discussion. The 19th-century building that got the most press, “Twin Houses,” memorialized an estate squabble. Two inheritors fought to get (and show they’d gotten) precisely half of an inheritance. You’ve seen the house: two two-story structures, built one in front of the other, connected in the middle, left side of highway 34, just before the East Ridge turn-off? In grammar school, when I had to write a report on the house, your grandmother dutifully drove me over to “interview” the historian who lived there. A grandfather’s clock ticked. Floorboards creaked. The air inside smelled of . . . not much. It was a house that had survived wars and the Southern clime but lacked spirit. One didn’t come away with a sense that euphoric joy had lodged there in any century. Whatever info the historian spat out, I copied down, failing to ask follow-up questions about any of the principals, including the intriguingly-named Affiah and Lovey. I could blame the dereliction on the house and its oppressiveness, but the fault was mine. I was young, fast bored with history.
Love,
Aunt K
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West Coast
Monday, Nov. 4
Dear DeeDee,
When your great-grandfather and grandfather built your grandparents’ house, they cut each board with a handsaw. As a teenager, to prove I could, I sawed one board in half and caught the teeth with every stroke. “Put more arm into it,” I was told. The amount of “arm” that went into the house your dad and I grew up in beggars the imagination. And yet it was built. The bathroom/bedrooms extension, completed by your grandfather and a sidekick twenty years later, had the power tool advantage but not much luck, weather-wise. The scaffolding had just gone up when a freak snowstorm dumped five inches. Nothing else to take his time, your grandfather helped me build two snowmen in the yard but, thinking himself unobserved, glanced repeatedly beyond our project to the stalled, his mind clearly on snow melt. Once the extension was finished, I had a new bedroom that looked out onto the backyard, a curve of woods, a wedge of field—none of it threatening in daylight. A different vista, though, backyard night.
Love,
Aunt K
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West Coast
Tuesday, Nov. 6
Dear DeeDee,
My Baptist Training Union Sunbeam claque (as in: “Jesus wants you for”) would periodically don our Sunday clothes on Saturday and be driven to the house of one or another “shut-in” where we’d sing and recite Bible verses. As extracurricular church activities went, those visits were well intentioned and seemed welcomed, as far as my seven-year-old senses could determine. The Saturday our Sunbeam leader, Mrs. Roberts, pulled into the driveway of a house on the swampy side of the causeway, it felt weird, though. Weird because no traveler reached E. City via route 34 without passing the house, and I’d never asked—or wondered—who lived there. Our squad followed Mrs. Roberts through a chilly hallway into a dim living room, floorboards covered by a linoleum rug worn through in spots, its florals rubbed pale. Our hosts sat close to the oil furnace that shot out into the room and because the room held little else besides their chairs we Sunbeams had plenty of space to fan out and perform “large.” Our usual repertoire spanned the (obligatory) “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” “Jesus Loves Me,” and a group rendition of the 23rd Psalm, two of those three (or three of the three?) cringingly self-centered, given our mission. I can’t remember whether the two women were sisters or cousins or just friends sharing a home to pool meager resources. But their unwavering smiles were very similar as was their palpable desire to prove themselves a grateful, responsive audience. I suppose it was the combination of physical frailty and heroic effort that stuck with me. That, and how awful and awkward it felt to finish up and leave that sad place without, as Sunbeams, having done much to turn it brighter.
Love,
Aunt K
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West Coast
Wednesday, Nov. 6
Dear DeeDee,
I’m being carted down outside steps in the arms of a stranger, my arms frantically reaching for the left-behind, mouth wailing. The rest is fuzzy. Through persistence, I persuaded your grandmother to supply the missing details. We were at a cottage in Nags Head, “past the pier,” and a visiting teenager had asked permission to take me to the beach. Glad for the childcare break, your grandmother handed me off to “a girl who loved babies, who just wanted to spend some time with you, play with you. You’d have thought you were being kidnapped.” (And how was I to know I wasn’t?) Because I put up such a howling fuss, the expedition was abandoned, the mom-in-training disappointed, your grandmother at pains to explain my non-embracing personality. In March of 1962 that same cottage, one of two separated by less than five feet of air and sand, got taken to sea by the Ash Wednesday storm. As a family we journeyed down to survey the wreckage, marveling (yet again) on the how and whys of ocean snatching one structure while sparing the next. In one of my more maudlin phases at the time, I fixated on the mate-less-ness of the survivor cottage: how alone it seemed, how stranded. Since family maudlin phases come and go, shall we call them tidal?
From the hurricane-less coast,
Aunt K
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West Coast
Friday, Nov. 8
DeeDee,
As a child, which event exposed you to the terrible truth that not everything could be fixed or recovered from, the surrounding adults as helpless as yourself? For me and most of my friends, it was a classmate’s accidental shooting of her older sister. None of the community’s comfort rituals seemed appropriate or applicable or remotely up to the task of lessening the family’s grief. Visits to the house, paying respects in the very room where the dead had suddenly, violently died, placing casseroles and cakes on the kitchen counter for three survivors who couldn’t eat or imagine eating ever again. Along with Debbie and Diane’s family, it was if the entire community went into collective shock. No one blamed my classmate—she and her sister were just kids, playing. And however much the father blamed himself, the castigation remained self-inflicted. Keeping loaded guns in the house was a country practice and remained so. A week after the funeral, Debbie returned to school. She hadn’t been wildly popular prior to the accident, so our intense, ultra-friendly attentions represented another upending of her world. We were rehearsing for the spring cantata, and as Queen of Fairies I sang my lines while waving around a magic wand your grandmother had constructed from scrap wood and aluminum foil. It wasn’t as if I’d believed in magic or magic wands prior to the accident, but afterwards the pretense of that belief onstage seemed . . . a travesty, I would have said, if I’d known the word. Viscerally wrong, in any case, emphasizing the gulf between fact and wishes. Our yearbook that year carried a full-page memorial to Diana. I still have my copy. Is it callous or kind to hope that between then and now Debbie mislaid hers?
Love,
Aunt K
Glint Literary Journal 