I...heart...this. (I mean, my heart feels this, and likes it, and feels the hurt, too.)
When I moved to London for what would be five years, I visited some teammates in a house with a yellow door and as I walked inside, I thought, "This is my house." A year later a new roommate and I moved into it. I moved back to the US in 2002, and my last visit to London was in 2008. I stayed with friends who lived next to the yellow-door house...only it wasn't a yellow-door house anymore. Some new tenants (after the ones who lived there after me) were gutting it and, it sounds like, doing something to it similar to what was done in your Asheville house.
"My" house still exists, but, like yours, only in my memory. Hugs if you want them. 😊
Writing a book is such an adventure with so many detours--you think you're headed one place and you end up somewhere completely different. I started my "Belgian Book" about my parents' years there after WWII, even traveled there, interviewed people who knew them in the US and Belgium, did tons of research and the book, my 19th, ended up being about--wait for it--Germany.
Yes! Crazy and wonderful too. The memoir garnered me two book tours across Germany and dozens of great gigs in the US and Canada. It put more miles on me than anything else I'd written or ever could write.
The other day I was looking on Google maps at the house where I grew up, the house where my parents lived when I was born and where I lived until the summer I turned 12. I clicked on street view, curious what the front of the house looks like now. It was so disturbing. Not that the little oak in the front yard that used to be not much taller than I am is now a great spreading tree. I expected that. Not that there's now a house shutting the house in from the street. But that the front windows are gone! When my parents bought the house it had a carport off the side which before I was born, or maybe when I was still a baby, they closed in to make the den. The front wall was of field stone and there were three long windows there, with arched tops. My mom's handmade macrame planter hung there with potted plants which I used to water. From those windows I could look out on the front yard, see my dad come home. And now that wall has two narrow horizontal windows up near the ceiling. It's so disorienting and I'm not even sure why. It's been almost forty years since I lived in that house, but I can still walk through it in my memory and see the textures of the tiles, the wallpaper, the carpets. I know it's not the same anymore. My parents had to do extensive renovations after tenants trashed the place-- and then they sold it. And that was years and years ago. But why on earth would anyone block up those magical windows?
Melanie, my apologies for taking so long to respond--to another wonderful comment from you that feels like it wants to be its own essay/post. The directions you could go, meditating on windows, openness and clarity and sight and connection versus being closed off. The high, narrow windows (I can picture exactly the type) that can't actually offer views of human life feel especially metaphorical. Thank you for sharing this meditation here!
No worries about taking too long. The glory of virtual conversations is the ability to come back to them without having lost the thread, even when weeks have passed.
I think you're right about this wanting to be its own post. I'm so focused on poetry these days, partly because a poem is so short and focused, but you make me want to have the bandwidth to write longer form essays. I'm going to keep playing with it to see if I can find the direction it wants to go.
I wish there was only one truth, and it arrived to us fully formed right when we needed it. It would be easier, but boring too., I guess. I have recently propped on my bookshelf a photo of me at my 7th birthday party. I am surrounded by fellow children who have been invited. Most are not looking at the camera. I am staring into the lens with a smile and a party hat fastened with elastic under my chin. I am leaning on my favorite gift, a game based on the movie Jaws. I am trying to understand that little girl, to see if the smile reaches all the way to her eyes, as we say. I wonder what she is thinking. She is still with me. I am like a Russian doll, with every age I've ever been inside me. I feel the need to take it apart and look but only briefly. I can only stand a quick glimpse. I think your houses are like that doll, each stacked inside the other.
Kellie, I'm sorry for being so long in responding. Your meditation here is so rich. Many possibilities to explore about memory and self. The little girl you were who is still inside the grown woman you are. That detail about a Jaws game! It's a micro essay. Thank you for sharing all these things. And you know how deeply I also feel the desire for one fully formed truth, ready for us when we need it. The ease of that, the relief. But it is not the way.
I can so identify. Thank you for putting this into words.
Thank you for saying so, Julie!
I...heart...this. (I mean, my heart feels this, and likes it, and feels the hurt, too.)
When I moved to London for what would be five years, I visited some teammates in a house with a yellow door and as I walked inside, I thought, "This is my house." A year later a new roommate and I moved into it. I moved back to the US in 2002, and my last visit to London was in 2008. I stayed with friends who lived next to the yellow-door house...only it wasn't a yellow-door house anymore. Some new tenants (after the ones who lived there after me) were gutting it and, it sounds like, doing something to it similar to what was done in your Asheville house.
"My" house still exists, but, like yours, only in my memory. Hugs if you want them. 😊
Ah, it feels so good to be understood, Jenn! Even if it's in the sorrow of losing a beloved home. Even a home we have left.
🫂
Writing a book is such an adventure with so many detours--you think you're headed one place and you end up somewhere completely different. I started my "Belgian Book" about my parents' years there after WWII, even traveled there, interviewed people who knew them in the US and Belgium, did tons of research and the book, my 19th, ended up being about--wait for it--Germany.
It's crazy, isn't it! The narrative takes hold of us, not the other way around. Thanks for being here, Lev.
Yes! Crazy and wonderful too. The memoir garnered me two book tours across Germany and dozens of great gigs in the US and Canada. It put more miles on me than anything else I'd written or ever could write.
The other day I was looking on Google maps at the house where I grew up, the house where my parents lived when I was born and where I lived until the summer I turned 12. I clicked on street view, curious what the front of the house looks like now. It was so disturbing. Not that the little oak in the front yard that used to be not much taller than I am is now a great spreading tree. I expected that. Not that there's now a house shutting the house in from the street. But that the front windows are gone! When my parents bought the house it had a carport off the side which before I was born, or maybe when I was still a baby, they closed in to make the den. The front wall was of field stone and there were three long windows there, with arched tops. My mom's handmade macrame planter hung there with potted plants which I used to water. From those windows I could look out on the front yard, see my dad come home. And now that wall has two narrow horizontal windows up near the ceiling. It's so disorienting and I'm not even sure why. It's been almost forty years since I lived in that house, but I can still walk through it in my memory and see the textures of the tiles, the wallpaper, the carpets. I know it's not the same anymore. My parents had to do extensive renovations after tenants trashed the place-- and then they sold it. And that was years and years ago. But why on earth would anyone block up those magical windows?
Melanie, my apologies for taking so long to respond--to another wonderful comment from you that feels like it wants to be its own essay/post. The directions you could go, meditating on windows, openness and clarity and sight and connection versus being closed off. The high, narrow windows (I can picture exactly the type) that can't actually offer views of human life feel especially metaphorical. Thank you for sharing this meditation here!
No worries about taking too long. The glory of virtual conversations is the ability to come back to them without having lost the thread, even when weeks have passed.
I think you're right about this wanting to be its own post. I'm so focused on poetry these days, partly because a poem is so short and focused, but you make me want to have the bandwidth to write longer form essays. I'm going to keep playing with it to see if I can find the direction it wants to go.
I wish there was only one truth, and it arrived to us fully formed right when we needed it. It would be easier, but boring too., I guess. I have recently propped on my bookshelf a photo of me at my 7th birthday party. I am surrounded by fellow children who have been invited. Most are not looking at the camera. I am staring into the lens with a smile and a party hat fastened with elastic under my chin. I am leaning on my favorite gift, a game based on the movie Jaws. I am trying to understand that little girl, to see if the smile reaches all the way to her eyes, as we say. I wonder what she is thinking. She is still with me. I am like a Russian doll, with every age I've ever been inside me. I feel the need to take it apart and look but only briefly. I can only stand a quick glimpse. I think your houses are like that doll, each stacked inside the other.
Kellie, I'm sorry for being so long in responding. Your meditation here is so rich. Many possibilities to explore about memory and self. The little girl you were who is still inside the grown woman you are. That detail about a Jaws game! It's a micro essay. Thank you for sharing all these things. And you know how deeply I also feel the desire for one fully formed truth, ready for us when we need it. The ease of that, the relief. But it is not the way.