Chance, Fortune, Each Flake of Snow
In the Living Room with A City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge
Welcome! You have arrived at the sixth installment of my house-built, book-driven, autism-fueled memoir-in-essays, At Home with Books. This story is for anyone who has needed to belong.
*Forgive the blowing wind in the audio recording. Today’s was an outdoor reading, for which I will not apologize.
“…whatever it is
that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever
blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am
grateful, I bear witness”
~ Joseph Stroud, “Manna”
I can hardly pull my eyes from the screen to write about the house in the picture.
I enter the address and zoom down to that home I lived in for a mere ten months crossing from 29 to 30 years old, and for a stretch of minutes, the memories I expect to flood my mind are held at bay around the fringes of the springtime garden captured in the photograph. The house casts itself toward me, instead. A sure and true line out of time into the river of my being, it grabs for my soul like Thoreau’s fishing line down into the stars, trying to hook eternity. Or maybe, in the reverse, like an enstructured version of Annie Dillard’s mountains. She says, “You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back.”
This house is that mountain; it greets me like a person who once knew me intimately and has been expecting my return. It has been holding my spirit fast.
The image of the house itself is Picassoed into a blurred and fractured brown box whichever way I spin the picture or walk the surrounding roads on my computer screen. No matter; it’s definitely there. My heart is racing now. I twist and turn the image some more. A different inroad shows me not the bright, crisp detail of garden petal and leaf, rock wall and cracked pavement, but an unpixelated view of the structure from above, its rust-red roofs gabled above the rooms I know by heart.
Now the memories rush in.
There is the orange, crackle-tiled porch where the family I lived with ate warm-weather dinners at the cast-iron table, just outside the casement windows of the blue room I called mine. In the screen image, I can see the flower bed where rosemary grew four feet tall until a particularly cold winter snapped it after I’d moved away. Walking up the shallow steps after every return home, I would run my hands through the nearest herb bush, swirling its spicy, pined scent into the deep night atmosphere that seemed to hover warmly about the place at every time of day. I can see the yard in back where my wedding pictures were taken several years later. There is the pathway curving toward the neighbor’s property under a thick cluster of trees. The hanging swing and old tree fort don’t show, but they are nestled there in my mind.
The internet photo won’t show the actual house no matter what I do. No matter; I am up the smooth-worn patio stairs now and into the kitchen. (Don’t let the screen door slam.) An immediate left through an open, oak-trimmed doorway, and the long stretch of dining table is in front of me, cloth-covered as always and set with candles. But this is only one end of a very long room, reaching from front to back of the house. The other two-thirds are living room, sitting room, parlor, whichever word you choose. There are enough soft leather sofas, vintage chairs, and antique tables arranged here to make this space whatever you need it to be.
It is never bright here, but sometimes during the day, a dancing green light shines through, borrowing color from clorophylled leaves as it passes through the windows. At night, the room is cavernous, and when a fire is lit in the red brick fireplace or the decorative white twinkle lights on the mantle turned on, the effect is something both otherworldly and very near, like C.S. Lewis’s vision of glory that’s as close and ordinary as “the bread upon the table or the coals in the grate.”
You think to yourself, “Now this is a living room.”
When I think back on my short time in that house, the heavy oak doors, the steps up then down, the dark passages from one room to another with all the life flowing through them, I always end up in that living room, always on one particular January afternoon.
I sit on the wooden floor, my back against the arm of a tired leather sofa whose cushions are worn down in places to the fiber backing. The red brick fireplace towers to my left. The wood in the grate illuminates the emerald wool of the scarf I am doing a very amateur job of knitting. Outside, the close sky has been shaking down snow flurries since lunchtime. Inside, on the other side of me, sits the family cat called Rascal. I reach out to pet him from time to time, despite my cat allergy, despite my kitchen altercation with the same creature one month before, and I think along with poet Joseph Stroud in his poem “Manna,” Look: “Look how happy I am.”
Earlier in the day, I have met the man who will become my husband, and though I cannot know that end result, something in my foundation has shifted; I can feel change blowing in on the arms of the afternoon snowflakes. Rascal keeps allowing me to pet him, purring, leaning his thin, bony jaw into the palm of my hand as though he, too, were mine, before suddenly living up to his name again and sinking several claws deeply into my palm, then sauntering off, supercilious.
In my memory, it is dark out, the end of the day. But that doesn’t make sense, because I also remember finishing off the evening with a concert, emerging from the unassuming front door of downtown Asheville’s Grey Eagle theater into dark night and thickening snow. It must be late afternoon, the dim room and the bright fire and the seed of a dream I can’t even picture yet turning the day into an enlivening twilight. My hand hurts where the cat broke the skin. I sit in the living room, alone but not alone, in the middle of everything past, present, and about to happen in my life.
Long before that day, before actually moving to Asheville, before knowing what wealth of life and love and friendship it held, before I knew it would become a Home to me, capital H, I came as a visitor. On that first, early visit, I traveled through the Western ridge of mountains on I-26 North, passed several exits shouldered by hills, merged with 250 East and curved to the right, now inside of the ring of mountains, and suddenly I was circling, sailing around a golden city, spire and dome, tall building and green tree turning like an autumn-themed snow globe on display for my awed consideration.
It was so much like the experience of protagonist Jocelyn in Elizabeth Goudge’s novel A City of Bells that when I read the book fifteen years later, I was stunned, my own introduction to my very real mountain-circled town reflected back to me between bound pages. In the beginning of the book, Jocelyn’s train swings “round a bend,” toward the city that will become his home, “the blue hills parted like a curtain.” On my initial Asheville visit, I circled the inside bowl of the surrounding blue ridge, and something prescient twigged in me, even back then: Could I live here? What might happen if I did?
Like me a year after that first Asheville visit, Jocelyn arrives in his new town battle-injured and spirit-wounded, suitcasing merely the hope of peace and rest and a new start. He is fleeing the grab of family expectations and financial concerns, the weight of pain and disappointment nipping at his heels. And then, after the initial, spinning view of his new town, he debarks his train and takes a horse-drawn cab to the center of town, where he is deposited before a green-doored, bow-windowed house that sounds him like a struck bell.
The place charms him immediately. More than charms him: it’s like a magnet, taking his thought and soul captive, and even though he thinks he is only in town to recuperate for a while with his grandparents, the possibility-laden house takes ownership of Jocelyn, even before he takes ownership of it.
After my attic time in the previous, little, loud Asheville house—after all the years before trying to fit in and find home—I entered the roof-gabled, many-windowed, mystery-cornered home now fragmented on my screen, not as a visitor or guest, but as an occupant. Ugly word that. Rather, I was welcomed in as family, a door harp ringing loud and sweet in my imaginative memory. But when you live with a family that is not yours and you are over-inclined to listen to culture’s expectations, you know the stay will only be a stop-over; this uncommon way of life cannot last.
The entire almost-year I lived in that house, I moved through my days in a tension of extreme belonging set against the knowledge I would, sooner than later, have to leave. The tension wouldn’t have borne so heavily on my heart had I not felt myself a true member of that family in all its seeming permanence—had I not thrived alongside them in, as the Oxford English Dictionary definition has it, that bustling “centre of family life.”