Moving House 2 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

We’re moving for the fifth time in three years. Not far—just down a country road to a little white cottage with a fenced yard. Still, every thing must once more be unscrewed, dismounted, taken from the walls and shelves and cabinets, wrapped in paper, stowed in boxes, and carried in the heat to another place, where it will look either reborn or even shabbier, its uselessness revealed in the unkind setting of a cardboard banker’s box.

I’ve packed up and moved so much that I don’t often come across lost treasures anymore. There are no boxes hiding in the attic that haven’t already been carefully edited. In my last post I wrote about my mother-in-law’s loving attention to the accumulation in her basement. I am her opposite; I’ve purged all but the essentials, and I don’t dwell much on the meaning of the stuff I’ve kept.

Or so I thought. Today, I wrapped up the worn plastic numbers I took from my childhood home just weeks before Hurricane Katrina filled it with Lake Pontchartrain, and I sank into memories.

We hadn’t lived there for ten years at the time, but whenever my sister and I visited our dad in his new house on the north side of town, far from the lake, we’d look for any excuse to sneak off and drive by the old place, and maybe hit the drive-through daiquiri shop on Pontchartrain Drive. On the night we stole the house numbers, we sat at the bar of the Southside Café, drinking Abita drafts. We’d told him we were going to the drugstore.

We might have gotten a little drunk. Slidell is small, and in the days before the storm it still felt so much the same as it had when were teenagers that it seemed unreal, like a Hollywood back lot, or some amusement park attraction: The World of Yesterday. When we drove by the old place, we were as excited and scared as we’d been in the old bayou cemeteries in high school.

It was dark except for the streetlight at the foot of our sloping driveway, a spotlight that shone on an empty patch of cracked concrete, just as it had when I’d watched from my bedroom window the neighbor boy turning 360s on his skateboard. The grass had grown tall, and someone had chucked a large foam daiquiri cup in the weeds. The shutters had been removed from the windows and were stacked on the front porch where we once stowed our BMX bikes. Sheets hung from the windows inside.

My sister stayed in her minivan, but I, sentimental, drunk, and irrational, leaped from the car and ran for the front door, a little dizzy from the beer, unsure of what I would do when I got there.

I stood on the porch, struck by the smallness of the place. It was clear nobody was home and hadn’t been in ages, so I tried the door but found it locked. I ran around to the side door. Also locked. But the gate was open and I could see the backyard, overgrown, and our clubhouse, where we’d tried to conjure spirits with a Ouija Board, had collapsed. I climbed the rotting wooden steps of the deck that my dad had built with help from the Time-Life home improvement books. I peered through the sliding glass door into the kitchen, saw the same appliances, the old faux-brick linoleum, the snack bar where we ate our morning Pop-Tarts.

It had been hard to imagine someone else living in my childhood home, but it was harder still to think that nobody cared for it anymore. It seemed it might crumble before my eyes. I wanted something, some souvenir, a piece of the place. A brick, or a clump of earth.

That’s when I thought of the house numbers, 261, faded and chipping. I reached up and gripped the six around the edges and yanked it—too hard. It came off easily, and I fell backwards into the bushes. I tore the remaining numbers from the house, some long-dead creature’s desiccated nest crumbling in my palm.

Satisfied, I ran for the minivan. My sister backed down the curving drive, her car navigating the curves instinctively, the way your muscles remember a dance. I felt victorious then. Now, it strikes me as awfully melodramatic.

I left the next morning with the numbers in my suitcase. A month later, the storm surged.

Now I’m wrapping these same numbers in tissue, thinking how glad I am to have them. They seem like relics, pieces of a once-living body. I’m placing them in a box, knowing that I’ll tell my daughter some day that they are not mere numbers but coordinates that point to a plot of marshy land near a lake, the place where I knew my mother.

But this time, I think, they’ll stay in the box. I used to like to be reminded of the old world. When I look at them, it seems no longer distant and dreamy, nor drowned and draped in net. But it’s time to put away such things, to look ahead, and make a home of my own.