The Old House

It’s an old trope that the best things in life aren’t things. Though true, some things are so closely associated with the best things that they become pretty great. This is a long and personal essay. I hope it reads like more than a therapeutic exercise for me.

One night last July, my daughter and I were sitting in the kitchen. She was knocking off crossword puzzles, and I was typing what I hoped would be a deeply profound essay for Sensible Medicine. A firefly arced close to the window and caught her eye. We stepped outside to watch a particularly rich show over the backyard.

About half an hour later, the sky opened with a spectacular midwestern thunderstorm. We opened the front door to watch the rain clatter down, the street turn to a river, and water stream from the eave over our door.

The sound and smell brought me back more than 50 years to a time when my mother and I would sit on the stairs in the middle of our house in Brewster, New York, during equally impressive storms. We sat on the stairs because the storms were a little frightening – we were in a 150-year-old wooden house surrounded by trees – but we were brave enough to open the front door at the bottom of the stairs, so that we could appreciate the entropic wind, rain, and electricity.

This is one of the hundreds of memories that connected me to that house so tightly that years later, its sale haunted my dreams for months.

But that was decades later.

The house defined my childhood more than the apartment that I lived in from the time I was born to the day I left for college. My family purchased the Brewster house when I was three years old. We spent nearly every weekend there, and my mother and I spent entire summers there for years.

Freedom

Before I was old enough to explore New York City, Brewster meant freedom. The days were mine. I’d hang out with friends, sit by the brook that ran across the property, or explore what seemed like endless forests and wetlands. The activities seem charmingly old-fashioned now – endless baseball, catching frogs, snakes, and turtles, and helping my mother in her vegetable garden. Some seem charming but also idiotic – playing chicken with cars in the summer, pelting cars with snowballs in the winter, and filling a wheelbarrow with gypsy moth caterpillars.

Mom’s Cooking

My mother was a fantastic cook; she made countless dishes that I adored and devoured. Some of these I make for myself or my family, savoring memories of her when I fry zucchini flowers, sauté tomatoes and eggs, and assemble “Christmas Pasta.” I can almost hear her telling me to add more salt, more butter. Other dishes are too tied to the era or too damn involved to make. I don’t even attempt these: chilled cucumber soup, ossobuco (with a little spoon to dig out the marrow), and gravlax.

Friends

I went from spending time alone or with my mom to spending weekends with school friends. I had Brewster Friends, but as time passed, those friendships faded -- too little time together and a widening gap between shared experiences.

There were always visitors at the house. Holidays and birthdays were peopled by family. Other weekends hosted a parade of my parents’ friends. My father erected flag poles and flew the flags of the country of origin of the visitors. (There were always chuckles when the Greek and Turkish flags or the Israeli and Iranian flags flew on the same weekend.)

In middle school, I started inviting friends. A weekend with a school friend would reveal the depth and promise of a friendship -- who would be a repeat visitor and friend for life, and who would be the friend destined to drift away with the shuffling of classes the following year. The visitor dictated the activities of the weekend. PT and I set up absurdly dangerous sledding challenges. AG and I sold black walnuts to passing cars. CS and I played 20 hours of a baseball-like game using a Whiffle ball bat and a ball made of wadded-up aluminum foil and masking tape. JW and I flirted pathetically with the daughters of my parents’ visiting friends.

The most memorable weekend activity started one Saturday morning when JM, AG, and I began digging an underground clubhouse. By noon on Sunday, with blistered hands, sore backs, and a 100 square foot hole, four feet deep, it became clear that this project would never be completed. I am sure there is still a scar in the forest floor.

Adolescence and Beyond

In the fall of my sophomore year of high school, my parents announced that I’d be allowed to stay in New York on weekends, alone. I became more of a visitor to than a fixture of the old house. Yet, unlike so many things jettisoned in adolescence, my attachment to the house remained strong. Friends and I still spent weekends there. I visited alone when I needed an escape. I holed up there for a week during college to study for the MCATs.

At some point, I even began calling to ask if I could spend the weekend -- the answer was always yes. Eventually, it became understood that if I were coming, Sarah would be coming too. The pull of the old house was so strong that when we decided to marry, we just assumed the wedding would be there. I don’t remember discussing any other options.

Conflicting Emotions

Visits to the old house with my own small children brought mixed emotions. I loved sharing the place that hosted many of my best moments with them. Seeing my parents with them was a gift. We also had some truly good times together there, hiking, catching frogs, and car washes that ended up as water fights.

Yet there was something painful about the visits. My parents were less up to caring for the house. Once, working on the place was an activity shared by all. Now, its constant needs were a stressor. It was clear that I’d never be using the house myself and never be able to commit the time to its upkeep. After my father died, these feelings were more powerful and more painful. My mother loved the old house perhaps even more than I did. She took pride in managing it on her own. But she acknowledged that we’d have to make a change at some point.

The End

A week before a serious medical event, my mother and I discussed the future of the old house. The following spring, I’d spend a couple of weeks with her there, get things fixed up, and start the process of selling it.

Then everything changed. Over the course of a month, my mother went from living independently in New York, driving to the house most weekends, to living in Chicago, without a car, with me managing her affairs. A 150-year-old house, 1200 miles away, could not be part of those affairs. With the absurdly generous help of a cousin, I moved a smattering of “treasures” to the Midwest, organized an “estate sale” during which 45 years of collected heirlooms were sold off, and sold the place.

Done, right? Hah. For the first time since I was a kid, I started having recurring nightmares. Without the new owners knowing, my family would visit the house for a weekend, fearing we’d be found out.

One night, reading a book to my daughter about a family falling in love with an old house that needed work, I started to cry. She looked at me, confused. This was not a sad book. I played my tears off as tears of happiness, telling her that the book reminded me of our Chicago house.

I was mourning the loss.

Then an email. An old friend had heard from an acquaintance that the house had been sold to a young couple with two young daughters. A few more emails, and I was connected with the family who had purchased the house from the original “as-is” purchaser. Hearing the couple’s excitement and sensing the Old House’s future, the dreams stopped.

Sarah and I have been back once to visit the old house. We walked the area of our wedding vows, and I showed the new owners where my old pets were buried. We finished the visit with a surreptitious visit to the adjacent wetlands. Years earlier, Sarah, my mother, and I had spread my father’s ashes here. This time, we spread my mother’s, which had made the trip in a small backpack I carried.

In a single afternoon, I revisited a treasured location, said a final goodbye to my mother, reunited my parents, and closed a (very long chapter) of my life.