Mini Essay: Letting the House Go

Not long ago, Margot and I went to a screening of a documentary about preserving the modernist houses in New Canaan, Connecticut. Afterwards, there was a Q+A with the filmmaker, who knows these houses intimately, having spent her childhood in one.

What was it like, the interviewer asked, growing up there? The house was like a sibling, the filmmaker said. Aren’t the spaces we live in like siblings—friends, confidants, witnesses to our most mundane and most momentous days?

It’s been almost a year since my parents sold the house I grew up in. As I see familiar patterns in the shift of the seasons, the grass waking up, the crocuses, I remember this time last year and what it felt like to know I had limited time in the place I loved most. After the purchase and sale had been signed, we spent a day tending to the garden, the one my dad had made and nurtured each season for 30 years, cutting back dead brush, raking out leaves, knowing we wouldn’t be there to see them in all their bloom. Summer was coming after a long winter in Maine, but for the first time, June meant an ending.

I read recently about the ability to picture things in your mind that aren’t in front of you. I can’t do this with most things, but I can do it with our house. I can walk through every room. The soft swing of the blue front door. The gathering room and the morning light pouring in. Yellow coffee mugs, half-drunk, on the kitchen’s soapstone counters. The way the curtains would shift a little with a breeze. The floorboard that slid a splinter into my foot. Towards the end, when my sister and I spent a weekend together in the house, we heard a persistent scrambling in the ceiling above the kitchen. A family of mice, or squirrels, had moved in; we never found out which.

On our last day in the house, my sister and I drove down to help, packing up the kitchen and wrapping in newsprint my grandmother’s bone china plates, the ones I was always too nervous to handle. We stayed for dinner with my parents and lit one last fire in the fire pit out front, looking out at the harbor and its shifting June light, the lobster boats knocking a little in the tide. How do you leave a place you love for the last time? I did my best, laid a palm on the white wall beside the front door for a minute before I walked out. Driving home I had the eerie sense, for a second, that the house could hear me and wished I’d said thank you.

I still have a stunned moment now and again, when I first wake up or when I’m falling asleep, that the house is no longer ours, that I can’t sit in the rockers on the porch or go to sleep in my bedroom or walk on the stones in the front garden, warm from in the sun. It’s an odd thing to know a place so intimately and not be able to return. I hope the new owners are taking care of her, though I catch myself worrying that she misses us, or wonders why we left her.

Inside the basement door, where we used to tack up every phone number we’d need—the pizza place, the movie rental place—we left the markings of our heights on the wall: my sister and me, 1992, 1996, 2000. And in the basement, where we hoped no one would paint over it, we all signed something new: our names, and the date, and the fact that we were here.