The day after it happened, I awaken to find the bedroom window slightly ajar, the narrow gap admitting, like jelly oozing from the far edge of a child’s sandwich, the distant melancholy croak of a morning jay. And through the wavering glass panes, to whose dust and grime I have already grown accustomed, there struggle beams of sunlight, not in that abundant all enlightening fashion that embraces morning people, but rather in individual streams, each gasping to find its own path through the relentlessly advancing opacity of decades, and each bearing with it a cargo of motes and other weightless impurities that dance and swirl with grace belying the utter lack of circulation in the room. Slowly, like burglars, a select few of these rays creep across the worn pine plank floor and up the side of the painfully plain and narrow bed. They carve their stealthy path across the disheveled collection of blankets and sheets that I have cast about in my fitful sleep. Ineluctably the most tenacious of the rays then crawl with furtive silence up my bare legs, their scarce discernible autumnal warmth insufficient to stir me. Only when the mightiest of the beams succeeds in traversing my bare chest, descending at last across my still tear streaked cheeks and closed eyelids, do I feel the brightness and try to turn away, and in so doing, reluctantly awaken. Only then, still prone but with eyes now for the most part open, do the jay sounds that have heretofore built their nest in my dreams encroach upon real life. Only then does the unexpected heat and mugginess of an early New Hampshire fall morning exhort me to sit up, blink away the night’s mysteries, and attempt to stand. Last night she slept in this bed, her last night. And now me.
The day has come at last, though I do not welcome it, cannot indeed in all likelihood bear it. I stand in the window peering out past assiduously trimmed rhododendron and oleander bushes, onto a large lawn that, for now, requires no attention at all, so fine is its condition. Though I am two generations descended from the woman in whose bed I have just spent the night, she nonetheless has (had) the stamina and enthusiasm of a school child, and the environs of the house reflect a measure of care and effort I can scarce comprehend even in myself, much less one who would have turned eighty in two months.
But that was yesterday (both literally and metaphorically) and I now stand silent and alone before the window, the house to myself, reflecting on the task before me and how it is I have come to this place. Others will begin arriving later today, some I have not seen in years – decades even. Yet for the moment it is just me and the house. Best anyone can tell, the place is more than two centuries old – serving for many years as the town’s sole one-room schoolhouse. The truth lies up the folding staircase, in the attic, where foot-thick hand hewn oak beams provide a frame that could easily support the house for another two hundred years if it comes to it. The only basis for this knowledge is a tea colored wall map, dated 1789, that hangs in the Rockingham County Historical Society Museum eight miles down the road in Exeter. On it is clearly drawn this lot (a bit over three acres) and this house, although oddly canted on the map, suggesting it may have been relocated on the property in some ancient past.
The house fairly teems with anachronism, the sorts of things one expects to find when old people live for a long time in one place, particularly if they live alone. In this case my grandfather is nearly thirty years gone and my grandmother was never one for discarding something that might have family history to it. My challenge is to make sense of it all, organize and distribute things, close out her final affairs. It is the dissection of a woman’s entire life, an autopsy of sorts, everything from kitchen cabinets and cellar nooks to the contents of her wallet and clothing pockets. The event itself was sudden, unexpected, and so there was no preparation for such a daunting circumstance, no recognition or acceptance of imminence. She was in better physical condition than many of her descendents, and seemed destined to outlive us all. And yet here I stand, wondering where to begin.
She had cats, loved cats. No one was ever quite certain how many. And yet this morning there are none. No crying for food. No curious purring figure-eights about the ankles. Nothing. Where do cats go at such a time? Still, their presence is everywhere. The faint acrid smell that pervades chair cushions and rugs – an odor etched in my senses from countless past visits, not altogether strong or unpleasant, but so distinct I will remember it still on my own deathbed. The empty bowls on the kitchen floor. The knick-knacks, books, and paintings. Something quick and white catches my peripheral vision outside the living room window. When I turn, it is gone. It will take them a while to warm up to me, I suppose. Still it helps a bit, knowing there’s company.
In her wallet is a New Hampshire driver’s license, a certification of apparently dubious merit. A banal assortment of credit cards and membership credentials to be filed and dealt with later. And a two-dollar bill, not the relatively new kind from the seventies, but an original from 1953, with Monticello on the back in a bright green that hasn’t been seen on money in half a century. I slide it into my own wallet, a memento that I vow to keep until the day others find themselves cleaning out my things.
There is a large black and white photograph on the living room wall above the couch, a naval destroyer she helped to build during World War Two, the black-framed brass-engraved image a token of the nation’s gratitude. There are collections – postage stamps, matchbook covers, cribbage boards. Cribbage boards from foreign countries, some made by personal friends or found at antique shops and craft shows from Canada to Massachusetts. There is a room dedicated to cribbage boards – they cover nearly every square inch of the walls. It is the first game I learned as a child, sitting on her lap, counting points, moving the pegs up and down the rows. Because of her, I knew cribbage before I knew the alphabet.
A desk drawer appears to hold every holiday card she was ever sent. A stack of birthday and Christmas cards, bound with a decaying rubber band that breaks when I try to remove it. Leafing quickly through one of the thick piles is like watching a zoetrope film – the lives of her children and grandchildren played out in short notes, school photos, and countless variations of “I love you, Nana.” I stare incredulous at my own five-year-old handwriting wishing her happy something or other. In the coming days some things will be relatively easy to throw away. I will probably keep these though – at least for a while.
She was a diary writer. There are several shelves of small books, bound in cracked dry leather, going back to nearly the turn of the previous century, one for each year. And yet, frustratingly, there is little inside that offers genuine insight. Just notes on the weather that day, how the garden was growing, what neighbor had had a new baby. Nothing introspective, no revelations describing how she felt about anything. It’s a New England thing – nothing internal gets out, not on paper, especially not in dialog. We keep things inside, the more important, the deeper it stays hidden. Emotion equals weakness. There are painfully brief scribbles noting the end of world wars and depressions. And there, (who could resist looking?) the single entry marking my own arrival on an unexpectedly mild day in the dead of a northeast winter.
January 12, 1957 – Fair and warm. Went down to hospital a.m. and p.m. Went back at 7 p.m. Stayed until 11:30 p.m. Laura’s baby, born at 11:25 p.m. 7 pounds, 5 ½ ounces.
Her second grandchild. I merit nearly a full sentence, though it would be days before I had a name. A day later the cryptic note “Had Cappy put away” appears. No doubt some unfortunate family dog or cat whose departure was heralded by my arrival.
My grandfather worked on the Maine Central Railroad and there are occasional notes about his trips downstate, fixing rails and ties, raking ballast, problems with supervisors, union issues, other railroading minutia. You’d think you would learn something from such an archive. I eventually (years later) read them all and learn only that she loved gardening (already common knowledge) and that, for many years, they got their eggs directly from actual chickens, whose prolificacy was apparently quite closely correlated with the weather.
Outside, beyond the small front porch, stands a short row of ancient apple trees. They still bear each summer, but the fruit is long past the point of edibility, except by birds or an occasional deer. They mostly fall to the ground each autumn and rot where they land. But even from that decay there rises a distinctly pleasing odor that I will always associate with the house – fresh cider and burning oak leaves. The trees are so old that large branches occasionally just give up and fall to the ground. This has been going on for years and the remains have always been dragged to a brush pile back by the tree line, a collection of limbs that represents the history of decades. There are branches at the bottom of this pile from a time when the trees were saplings. In the middle of the front lawn stands an old hand water pump, painted so many times that it’s probably an inch or more larger in diameter than when it was new. Working the handle yields only a creak and the faint hiss of dry air. I remember, as a child, when it worked. Even then though you had to prime it just right, the cantankerous leather seal not easily giving up its prize to the disrespectful.
Down close to the road stands a small narrow garage, whose flaking brick red paint reveals weathered gray pine beneath. It rests atop an ever-shifting collection of fieldstones, between which chipmunks scurry and play. The roofline sags noticeably in the center, and the corners of the shingles are curled with age. The front doors swing out wide to each side, as though it were a miniature barn. Opening these doors is, and has always been, very much like walking into an antique shop that has been closed for years. A long faded wooden sign lies on the floor, “Brentwood Volunteer Fire Department”, a town institution to which they both gave substantial portions of their lives, he riding the trucks and fighting the infrequent fires, she maintaining the firehouse and setting up for Friday evening BEANO. There are mason jars, bow saws, snowshoes, and hand tools made by companies that have not existed since the Second World War. Outside, along the back wall, grow wild irises that come to my waist, from the top of which spring each April vibrant but ephemeral purple and yellow teardrop shapes.
The real secrets of this house though lie in the darker places, the cellar and the attic. Like many old houses, the cellar ceiling is low and the air musty. There’s a furnace that clanks, and an ancient black heating oil tank, which to my childhood eyes had always had a somewhat monstrous look to it, particularly in the cellar’s poor light. A long rotted door in the back wall leads, by a bulkhead, to the outside. It’s years past use though, and no one has looked at the space between the inside and outside doors in decades. The cellar is accessed now using the twisting interior staircase that leads up to the kitchen hallway. There are more tools down here, and countless collections of nails and screws, stored in the time-honored tradition of nailing jelly jar lids to the ceiling and screwing the filled jars into the lids. A steamer trunk sits in one corner, large parts of it covered by mildew. Opening this will be like uncovering a time capsule, like decades of Christmas mornings rolling backward through the years. The walls are filled with shelves, and the shelves are stacked with boxes – mostly wooden boxes – whose contents, based on past explorations, will run the gamut from worthless decaying trash to long forgotten antiques. Like many old houses the cellar is lit, during the day, by thin gun-slit windows up high on the wall. Peering out onto the front lawn from here affords an insect’s eye view of the outside world.
Reaching the attic requires pulling down a set of folding stairs. It is a place for seasonal things, Christmas decorations, plastic turkeys and pumpkins, clothing boxes, things that travel up and down with some regularity – different from the cellar, into which things go usually never to reemerge. And while the cellar is damp and cool, the attic is hot and dry. There are many boxes up here, boxes that will have to be opened someday. Decisions made, what to keep, what to throw away, what to give to other members of the family. It’s overwhelming – there are at least a hundred boxes of all sizes. I find myself instead studying the enormous structural beams that frame the house. This is the only place you see it, the way the house used to be. There are no nails or screws, not even wooden pegs. The beams are simply notched and snugged together, like a bigger-than-life Lincoln Log set. I leave everything for now as I found it, making my way gingerly down the folding stairs and into the large kitchen. Nothing special really—linoleum floor, corners curled up a bit, the pattern worn through to black in a few high traffic areas. Like long lines of New Englanders before her, she reserved her fastidiousness for those places where it would show. The clutter of the cellar and attic are nowhere in evidence downstairs. Dishes are clean and put away. Chairs are pushed snugly up against the small round pine table. The refrigerator is somewhat smaller than normal, the top about eye height. It is filled with food she expected to eat today or tomorrow. Leftovers from meals she ate one, two days before. There’s nothing especially distinctive or exotic. Just staples – eggs, milk, bread, sensible things. And a quart container of blueberries, the tiny wild kind, destined almost certainly for something baked—muffins or cake.
In two hours I’ve skimmed over it all without actually moving or changing anything. I reach into the pine cupboard and take down a glass, inverted on the shelf to keep the dust out. Filling the glass with milk, I pull out a chair and sit down at the table. Outside the window one of the apple trees has filled with birds, drawn by her panoply of feeders and birdhouses. As I sit wondering where to begin, what exactly I should be doing, a white longhaired cat leaps insouciantly onto the windowsill outside. He sits on the sill, flicking his tail from side to side in that impatient way cats have. In past visits I never made much of an effort to distinguish the cats. This one looks familiar, but who can say? It bears only a generic-looking red collar and there really isn’t any way to prove that it’s one of hers, although that’s the logical conclusion to draw. At some point I will have to locate as many of them as I can (perhaps a neighbor can offer guidance on the correct number), and I will deliver them to a local shelter. We are not the sort of family that adopts orphaned pets.
Slowly, carefully, I reach up and turn the sash lock, sliding the window open halfway. The white cat stands with minor alarm, but does not jump down. Feigning sudden familiarity, it steps through the window frame and onto the table where it briefly examines my milk glass before jumping gracefully to the kitchen floor. It walks to the empty food bowl, then turns to me with silent imploring cat eyes. It opens its mouth halfway, but no sound emerges. I could easily take this as an expression of mourning, except that the cat has no way of knowing that its life has suddenly changed, only that the food bowl is empty.
So I find cat food, fill the bowl, and administer a brief rub behind the ears. It’s mid-morning and already uncomfortably warm in the house. Still, at this time of year, with winter lurking behind every cloud, these mild days are an ephemeral thing and not to be taken lightly. Picking up the milk glass I walk out the front door and sit down on the steps, listening to the birds cavorting in the apple trees, and catching, from time to time, another furry flash between distant bushes. After a moment the white cat steps through the open doorway, sliding against me in a gesture of friendship or comforting or perhaps just reassurance that at least I will not have to spend the rest of this day alone.