The Old House

Whenever I used to call Mimi ask how she was doing, she’d say, “Sweetie, I’m great. How are you?” Now, when I ask she always says the same thing: She sighs and says, “Oh, it’s hard. How are you?”

Papa died on the last day of February. Even when he was sick, she was still saying “Sweetie, I’m great.”

She was married to him for 58 years. They eloped as teenagers back when love wasn’t safe and no one had any notion that it possibly could be. Barely a goddamn dollar between them just a tool belt and a hairdressing kit and that kind of love that can transcend time, pierce it, become unsmothered, unsmoldered. They had to’ve, to be together that long, to be happy that long – because they really did seem happy together, all the way to the end. They must’ve had some kind of love like a mystic love: love that blasts its way out of everything, through to whatever was there before the universe, whatever will be there after, whatever’s past all edges. How can it not? It’s got to be that the feeling of things sometimes must be too powerful for the bounds of reality and space and time and whatever else to possibly hold – doesn’t it? It’s got to be that magic or the supernatural or whatever you want to call it is the sheer weight of emotion dropping through the tensile frameworks hidden around us, drops beneath it all and becomes the beyond, becomes objective meaning, becomes God. Doesn’t it?

They raised three girls and a boy. They moved from the mountaintop into town so they could get more work. When Papa retired and Mimi’s parents died they bought the house and moved back up on the mountain. Now, Mimi lives alone in the house she grew up in with the ghost of her childhood and the ghost of her husband of 58 years. Does it feel like home?

In the house she grew up in with her six brothers and sisters in a sepia past. The quietness of herself, the creaky stairs surrounded by pictures of fuller times. Making breakfast for herself. Brushing her teeth in silence. The children and grandchildren visit; we call; she always sighs and says, “Oh, it’s hard.”

My family lives in the house they moved to in town, where my mom grew up. We had to sell our old place to buy it from them. That summer and fall, every weekend cleaning, fixing, painting, refurbishing and renovating, room by room as they were emptied out. Near the end of that process, my brother I went up on the roof to clean the roof shingles and the second-story gutters. It was a gorgeous day that fall. Warm enough for just a T-shirt. We pulled the hose up on the roof and cleaned, and it was just us there that evening and we had all the time in the world.

We worked barefoot because it was warm and you get better traction on the shingles. Just T-shirts, sweatpants, and bare feet. We finished around sunset. And the air was so perfect that you couldn’t feel it at all, and somehow it felt so fantastic. End of the day, that pale kind of November sunset with this dead-on perfect temperature. And when we finished, we sat down on the roof of the house we grew up in after cleaning it up really good for the next people in this perfect temperature autumn sunset – neither of us suggested it, we just sat because it was so nice and talked a while.

But more than the weather, it was just a little after I’d stopped working a godawful job with an insurance company where I was gone all the time and in a bad mood when I wasn’t, and only a few weeks after he’d returned from living at his ex’s house, and dad was back, and our sister was good, so it was this time when everyone in the family was around, which hadn’t happened in years before, really, and hasn’t really happened since. And it felt like… not necessarily that we’d all stay there, because of course we didn’t, but that we were together and we were going to stay that way.

We didn’t even talk about it then. We talked about other stuff but not once did we say, ‘this is so nice’ or ‘it’s cool having all of us back again’ or anything like that, but since, he’s brought it up like four times. Always on some beautiful day, when the sun’s low and soft and it’s great just being outside. He’ll say, “It’s really nice out right now. But I think my favorite weather I’ve ever felt was that day on the roof, remember?” And I say, “Yeah, that might be my favorite too.” All we need to say, “that day on the roof,” that’s how much we both remember it. Every few times we see each other, every few months, one of us brings it up. And every time, it’s like we’re saying to the other, “I’m always going to be around.”

Whatever it was that day that was so nice, I think part of it was sitting on top of the house we grew up in. I think some of that warmth came from below. I think the houses fill the same way a person sometimes feels choked up, like the air in your chest doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry so it just shakes for a few seconds. All the houses, all the places we’ve been and left and gone back to together, filling and shaking and choking over and bursting out. Mimi sighing and saying, “Oh, it’s hard.” I never know what to say after that.