That Old House

The old house at the crossroads, its raw wood grown to a deep, dull gray, was already old and gray the first time my father drove us down the rocky dirt road to the farm. Its walls tilted and its porch sagging, the abandoned dwelling was the last piece of evidence I needed as proof that we would soon arrive at the end of the earth.

It hasn’t changed much in the fifty-something years since I first saw it.  The last remaining panes of wavy glass were shot out by drunk teenagers at least 30 years ago and the crepe myrtle tree that used to bloom in the fall has been completely overrun by sedge brush, but it remains the landmark by which we and our neighbors offer navigation to people who don’t use GPS.  And it turned out that the end of the earth is exactly where I was supposed to be.

Almost exactly one mile from my front door, the old house has become a part of my terroir, my “somewhereness,” the full descriptiveness of who I am.  I know it like I know the pond in my backyard, the fallen fencerow at the edge of the field, the tree struck by lightning that refuses to fall.  I can show you where  a clump of daffodils blooms every spring and where, come summer, gladioli the color of peach Nehi sprout right at the edge of the overgrown yard.  I have seen people stop their cars and herd their children into the cotton field that runs almost all the way up to the collapsing walls just to get what I am sure turned out to be their Christmas card photo.  And in a near-Southern gothic moment, my sister-in-law and I found my mother sitting on the hood of her mini-van in the shade of the old house’s rusted tin roof having thrown a pair of pantyhose at a rattlesnake in an attempt to charm him.

The house has been a part of the set design of my life for over half a century and I don’t think anyone, even – no, especially – the people who actually own it can blame me for feeling a little proprietary.

A few months ago I drove by and saw a pick-up truck backed up to the house and a couple of men I didn’t recognize loading bricks from the crumbling chimney.  Because country folks were the original Neighborhood Watch, I called my high-school classmate whose family owns the house and hundreds of acres surrounding it.  Turns out that one of his cousins was building a cabin and what initially appeared to be trespassing was an act of reclamation.

It didn’t stop with the bricks.  Over the last few weeks the men in the pick-up trucks have been taking boards – most certainly hundred-year-old heart pine – from what is left of the walls and now, instead of casting a thick black shadow over the crossroads as the sun climbs the sky, the house looks like a skeleton, light slanting through the empty walls.  I can see all the way through them, the remaining boards make me think of the ribs of long-dead roadkill.  

I think it is admirable, this reusing of resources, this saving of history, but I can’t help feeling wistful.  All around me, all around us, the landscape of the town, the county that birthed and nursed and reared me is being wiped away at a speed that feels more like demolition than progress – peanut fields replaced, seemingly overnight, by cinder block factories and stands of pine trees transformed into parking lots in a matter of days.  Can I be blamed for worrying that when the backdrops of our stories are gone so will be the stories?

Through the window of my house – a house that will one day in the not unforeseeable future become an old house with broken windows and tilting walls – the bright sun of the first post-freeze morning of the year steps over the horizon and makes silhouettes of the emptying trees, illuminates the fallen leaves, reminds me that the stories will never be gone, not so long as there is someone to tell them.

And as the sun eases silently higher and higher all I can think is, Let that someone be me.  Let it be us.  

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