For someone who writes so much about how often she finds herself back in her childhood home/bedroom after some misadventure (like right now), I realized that I’ve never really written about it, like, literally. This is so wrong of me, since I love my house. It’s the only home I’ve ever known, which is a balm and a privilege.
Sunset House is a little green cape at the bottom of a suburban lane, teetering on the lip of a hill that rolls into a stream. It sits in a yard of moss pillows and weed-y, begrudgingly tended perennials. Two trees guard it from the street: a Birch, near-naked after decades of having its skin lovingly peeled off for art projects and book marks, and a Hawthorn, which blooms with red berries in the winter and drops violent needles to the ground come spring. They rest behind a wooden fence that is always in some state of disrepair. Follow the cracked, uneven stone pathway to the front door for a knock and you will receive no answer save the sounds of dogs barking, but sneak to the side door on the mudroom addition—which leans uncertainly away from its host—tucked behind the driveway, and you will be welcomed into a baby pink mudroom twinkling with fairy lights. Yes it’s a mudroom but don’t bother taking off your shoes, we never do.
Upon entering the kitchen, you will be greeted by the reason we don’t take off our shoes, a rambunctious fox-hound who sheds so much it’s a wonder she isn’t bald. She will skitter across the green tile floor, rubbed raw from so much half-hearted mopping, and shove you into the once-white cabinets, still enjoyed despite their messiness because anything’s better than the medieval tavern wooden ones the house came with. Escape the hound and find refuge in the dining room, the center of the place. Burnt orange walls hold space for a gallery of collected artworks, their only commonality being that they would be uncommon anywhere else. A heavy wooden table, found on the side of the road somewhere some years ago, stands tall in the center of the room, rough with crumbs from last night’s dinner and fallen petals from whatever flowers were foraged from the garden for a centerpiece. There are smoke stains on the walls and wax drippings on the floor from all of the candle-lit dinners because this is a house that enjoys ambiance.
Beyond the dining room is the living room. Pause at the floor-to-ceiling shelves as you enter and alight upon the old works of poetry and fiction, collected from dusty bookstores across the continental United States, barely visible through the many photographs of distant youth. Beside the bookshelf is the music shelf, which houses a now-obsolete stereo system and record player. Stacks of CDs and vinyl reveal the tenants’ recent proclivities, but the center of the room and their minds is, yes, the television, around which the sagging couches and chairs gather, a layer of the hound’s hair keeping them warm. At any given time the people of this house can be found in this room in some configuration or another, listening, watching, reading, dozing.
Behind the shelves of dusty culture are the stairs, which once hid under a tired layer of shag carpeting, until the day came that two of the house’s occupants couldn’t stand it anymore, so they ripped it up and stapled a brightly-colored runner from the local Big Box Store over the splintery wood instead. Follow the creaky steps to the top, push aside the dog-gate that keeps the hound from spreading her hair where the people sleep, and enter the second floor. It technically contains two bedrooms, but only one of them has a door—the other is just an open space with a bed and windows—so make of that what you will.
Open the door that leads to the smaller room to the right. Behold: a desk. About half of it is taken up by a large television, but don’t worry about that now; pay attention to the desk. There’s a file box full of greeting cards with various tabs indicating categories such as “birthday,” “congrats,” and “love” because the owner of this desk is a romantic. There is a half-spent candle and a mug commemorating Queen Elizabeth II’s 70 years as monarch before her death, containing various brightly colored pens. The drawers of the desk hold gadgets and gizmos aplenty, and the shelf beside it houses a collection of books both contemporary and classic as well as whose-its and whats-its galore. Apart from the desk and the bookshelf there is a dresser, atop which can be found all manner of lotions and potions and also plenty of thing-a-ma-bobs, and then also a bed, never fully made, always cluttered with books, remotes, phones and laptops and such, notebooks, pens, dirty dishes, a stuffed and weighted dinosaur plushie named Leonard, and sometimes the hound if the people left the gate open and/or want some canine company.
When I write it down for you to so you can really see it, it makes me feel like I never want to live anywhere else—which is lucky because I always end up back here despite trying to live anywhere else, so I might as well start taking that as a sign. In a vacuum, left to my own devices, this dinky, dirty, hodge-podge of a house is a palace, but when people who aren’t from it enter it, even people I love, my instinct is to apologize for it. I see the scuffs on the walls and the bedrooms that aren’t really bedrooms and the dog hair and the cracks and the creaks, and I think, this is a hovel.
But then why do I feel so rich? Why, when I close my eyes and envision my future, do I see that couch?