Wow. I feel like I have a million different things to say, and I’m not sure which one to start with.
I just got back a couple of days ago from the Jordan study abroad, and I’m currently at “home” (or something similar but not quite it), here in Massachusetts. In a couple of days, I’ll be heading out to Utah with my brother in law, and we’ll drive with a trailer full of stuff.
I’m looking forward to the trip, but almost more I’m looking forward to being in Utah again. It’s funny, because that place can feel so old after a while, but that’s where all my friends (and most of my family) currently are, so I feel like my life is on hold as long as I stay out here.
I put quotation marks around “home” because really, my parent’s house isn’t exactly my home. Not in the full sense of the word. It’s not where I grew up, and it’s not where I’ve lived for any significant period of time. In some ways, it feels more like my grandparent’s house than anything else.
Nothing else for me to do back home except explore old memories, I decided spontaneously to drive up to the old house where I’d grown up. It wasn’t ours anymore. We’d moved out of it nearly two years go. The woman who bought it from us was single and had nearly a dozen kids from three different parents. After we moved out, they trashed the place. That’s the last I’d heard of it.
As I drove past, I saw that all the plants in the front were grown over. The red brick mailbox was partially destroyed, evidently by a careless driver. There was a For Sale sign leaning against it. The driveway was empty, but I was hesitant for fear of someone seeing me through a window.
Then I saw a black box dangling from the doorknob on the front door. “What the heck?” I parked the car and walked boldly across the lawn. Sure enough, there was a notice pasted on the door. It said “to enquire about this property, please call…”
The house was foreclosed. The previous residents were all gone.
Nobody was there.
I couldn’t hold myself back. I stepped around the house, peering in all the windows. I walked around back, as if exploring some ancient ruins in a far off land. This space where I had grown up, where I hadn’t returned in nearly a quarter of my life, was practically sacred to me–which only made the desolation that much more surreal.
Walking across the lawn where I used to play as a child, it seemed like the walls of the house were screaming at me. The place was saturated with memories, and they all came back to me as I reverently walked around the property. This was where we had built the old swingset. This was where we had house trained our dog, late at night, while watching Apollo 13 which had just come out on DVD. This overgrown, jungle-infested hill was where I had worked one summer to build terraces for a garden that we never planted. That window was the one that we kids used to secretly leave unlocked so that we could sneak inside if we had to. It was locked tight.
I felt like the place was a holy temple that some gang of street thugs had tagged with crude, ugly, spray painted words of hate. I felt violated. The plants which we had so carefully tended were collapsing on their own, untended overgrowth. Weeds as tall as myself grew in front of the doors. Inside the windows, the floors were scratched to pieces, the doors were dented at the corners, the carpets were stained and dirty. The awning we’d put over the deck was completely gone. The equipment for the fireplace was in pieces, leaning against the wall.
It was like ages had gone by, and the walls were screaming out to me. I was too shocked by what I saw to cry. Yet, at the same time, I was grimly fascinated. It was like I was watching a movie, entertaining myself with my thoughts while someone else controlled my body and my emotions.
All this time, I couldn’t help but think how ironic it would be if one of my old neighbors called the cops on me. To be arrested for walking around the house that, five years ago, I’d left and entered every day. That to return to the place where I’d made the transition from childhood to adolescence and left my adolescence behind now felt like a crime and made me look suspicious. I didn’t care enough to let it stop me.
Later that night, I heard the rest of the story from my father. The woman who had bought the house from us had fallen behind on her mortgage. She was probably one of the thousands of Americans who used the housing bubble to buy a house far beyond her means. Instead, she took out a twisted insurance policy: she slept with the son of her creditor for ammunition to use as blackmail.
It didn’t work, though. In the end, she got foreclosed and evicted just like everyone else. And now, my old home sits ruined and abandoned.
To me, the place is as fractured and weathered as Jerash, Luxor, or Um Al-Jumaal. It’s just gone.
Well, that’s not something that I was planning on saying, but it just sort of spilled out of me. That’s one thought of many, and one of them had to come out somehow. Since this post is getting kind of long, however, I’ll cut it here and save the rest for a new one.