It's mid-December but the air's still warm and wet--the freeze we had for the last week-and-a-half is long since gone. I'm standing on the now-vacant lot of 3100 Evergreen Point Road, the place in Medina my parent's bought on contract in 1951 and transformed into a family compound. I've eked my way through a eight foot cyclone fence that had been erected to keep people like me out--curious, interested bystanders who might have something to say about the demolition going on inside. There's mud on the asphalt, mud rimming my black boots and in the distance I can here the hum of heavy machinery, ripping into one of the structures on the Barbie's property--I don't even look to see what structure is coming down, because I don't really want to know. I just stand there, in my muddy boots, in the rain, and take in what was once a house, a life.
This morning early I received a call from my sister-in-law. "It's gone," she said. I mean totally gone."
"What's gone," I asked her.
"The house, both houses," she told me. "I saw it this morning coming over 520--I couldn't see the Barbie's house anymore. Just a patch of dirt. So I drove by on the way to my meeting."
I couldn't read my sister-in-law's voice--this property in Medina was her home for nearly the duration of her marriage and yet her voice sounded neutral, informational--like this could be any one's home that's now razed to the ground and she was just reporting the facts.
We knew this moment would come--that's why the state purchased the property, after all. But still, so many months have passed since the sale closed. I'd begun to fantasize that maybe the house, my childhood home, would stand, despite the facts suggesting otherwise.
I wonder why Terry has called me to impart this news--not that I'm complaining. I'm glad she did. But what am I to her? Since the debacle of Thanksgiving, when Terry and her family celebrated this day with Mom but without inviting me, she has started calling, leaving voice mails, offering bits of information behind like breadcrumbs. Why? I don't have an answer.
It's been months since I've driven down Evergreen Point Road headed towards Mom's house. For those weeks in March and April of this year, I made this drive everyday, sometimes several times a day, trying to unload Mom's house of all her "things." I'd arrive early in the morning, before my moving help got there, and begin to sort yet another box of dirty, discarded objects. I never wore gloves so by the end of the day there was grime under my nails. My fingers and hands and arms were a quiver of pulled muscles from the boxes I'd lifted, sorted, carried outside and set down on the asphalt in the system of piles I'd developed: recycle, dump, hazardous waste, Mom's new house, my house, Eric's storage shed, Mom's garage. I'd seen this as a job to get done--I had to. In my mind, I decontextualized everything--tried to ignore this was a door my father hung or the slate floor my parents resealed every spring, or the stove Mom cooked eggs over easy for my father every morning. There was no other way through.
It wasn't until the night before the estate sale in late April that it finally hit me, ran me over--this is my family's home, my home, and by the end of the weekend there would be just these four walls standing, so to speak. Nothing else. All that belonged to my family would be sold or taken to the dump. I'd stood there, amidst the jumble of the items marked with orange stickers saying $1.00, $8.00, $50.00, "Best offer," and felt the weight of the years--a ballast keeping me anchored down. Was I drowning in the ruble or was this junk, these "finds" all that was left of a precious life? I'd begun grabbing then, fitting my hands around a stuffed brown velor bear with orange embroidered eyes I'd had in grade school, two Nancy Drew mysteries I'd read in junior high, a yellow smiley T-shirt I'd bought on family vacation, a red faux-leather belted coat I'd worn at age six or seven, well-used pink toe shoes and a netted purple tutu I sported for a performance at Cornish School for the Arts. Even a rusted iron outdoor side table (without glass top) made it's way into the back of my car. I grabbed at all of these and more and began stuffing them into garbage bags. There was no stopping my reclamation project. Not even knowing I was in violation of the contract with the estate sale handlers could hold me back. According to what I signed, all items now belonged to the estate handlers and any items taken after they assumed possession would have to be purchased at fair market value. I had no intention of "paying" for any of these items--they were mine. I bought them, wore them, lived with them. A common law right to everything that was appurtenant to my life.
It was late, the house almost dark, and still I searched for the things that were my life. No one else there. Just the sobs rolling my tongue, filling my family's wall to overcapacity. I've never felt such desperation.
So now, eight months later, I'm here again. Only there's nothing here but the rubble of a house. Bricks chipped and split. Concrete cracked and splintered into unrecognizable pieces. The foundation is here, but only the remnants. I walk carefully the perimeter, tracing the rooms I know so well. Kitchen leads to hallway leads to dining room leads to back hallway leads to my bedroom and my brother's bedrooms. These spaces look so small--impossible they could have held all these people, all these years. I'm told foundation are deceptive in this way, never look their actual size until the wallboard and 2x4 are in place. As I'm stepping through the concrete wreckage, I work to avoid the crumbled mortar and busted-up brick. There's so much here to distract. To my right is what is left of the family room fireplace. I can see it even though I'm standing in Peter's room. With no walls one's sight becomes 20/20. I remember stories about Dad building this fireplace, about the art of laying a level foundation for all the rest of the bricks to follow. The beers he and my uncle drank, as they put on the roof--Carlsberg Black Label Beer. I don't think this is made anymore. What must it have been like to see the walls buckle, the concrete split, the shingles pulverized under the pressure of a backhoe, a bulldozer. How did this house come down? This is not something I will ever know.
Maybe there aren't words for the death of a house. Every thought, every linguistic manifestation seems inadequate. It's an erasure--my parents' energies, time, money all reduced to dirt. Earth to house, house to earth. An imperfect weave. And there will be nothing to visit--no grave marker for the lives lived here. I can't come visit, imagine another family living in these walls, knock on the front door and ask to have a peak inside just to remind myself of what was once here. Soon there will be nothing here, not even this scraggle of a foundation. A bridge will be built, concrete will cover the ground. No room for a sigh or a groan. Just the silence of a man-made invention, and then of course the whine and howl of traffic as commuters make their everyday way to work and back home over territory that once held a family's living, breathing life.
So perhaps I'm wrong, this ruptured ground is not a cemetery. Not at all. I won't be visiting a grave like where my father's buried at Walshelli. I won't even be returning to weep, because what will there be to see--eight lanes of traffic converging on the northern shore of Lake Washington. I don't miss the irony, of course, how my father battled tooth and nail against the erection of the original 520 bridge, fighting with local cities and ultimately the state. He was one voice against the machine of progress. Mom has saved all the clippings. I found them on one of our many forays into Mom's "keepsake" boxes. Now, thirty years after his death, the 520 expansion literally swallows him whole--finishes the job it began back in 1960 when the first bridge was built. There's nothing left except the trees that had overgrown the house over the years--monstrous specimens of laurels and rhododendrons and magnolias and ornamental maples. Large enough to have shielded this house from change, from the passage of years. But in the end they couldn't.
I've taken photos, but the rain and my shaking hands make the resolution less than legible. So really there will just be what I remember in my head. Memory will have to be enough. As I restart my car to head back over 520 to see Mom, I drive slowly past the moss encroached walkway leading to a now-absent front door, the sleek laurel hedge some twenty feet tall separating our property from the Elliots, the off-white stone near the side of the road bearing the numbers "3100." I can't cry enough tears. I just can't. My family's life plowed under, making way for the next crop, the next public need. The factivity of this is so great, it temporarily overwhelms the logic of my own brain, the logic that tells me we are not the walls we live in, home cannot be a piece of ground.
But here I am, all the same. Alone. Wailing in the midst of the demolition, a river of tears at my feet.
Certain I can never go home.
Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--
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