Today I wonder about all of the people who have lived in this house. What were their lives like? What sadness, what joys were parts of their lives? What memories remain of their time here? The ghosts of family dinners, school dances, weddings, baptisms, comings and goings, the voices of the old and the laughter of the young, heartbreak and great happiness must remain somewhere.
I clearly remember the 1968 back yard, when young, inexperienced, relatively poor and so hopeful, we moved in with our homemade sofa and refinished dressers and a set of white dinner ware that I had bought at Grants. There were two Rose of Sharon bushes on the hill and four peonies where the hill touched the black top that covered the area that was once the floor of a garage. According to our neighbor, Mr. Woodford, it had to be taken down because of the springs coming out of that hill that undermined its foundations.
We opened up an uninsulated three season porch to the rest of the house with French doors, flooding the dining room with borrowed light. There was nothing in the yard to filter the sun that streamed in the windows. I dug garden beds and planted flowers in what seemed to be a vast backyard. Some were remembrances of the gardens of my youth, flowers that my mother loved and gooseberries that were a staple in my grandmother’s jams and pies.
When our son was born, the photos show gooseberries in the background behind the little wading pool or the sandbox that sat just outside the backdoor. When he was four, we built an addition to the house, moving out from that porch into most of what was our yard. The four o’clocks and the gooseberries were sacrificed.
When our daughter was born, there was still room for the tiny pools, the child sized wheel barrows and such. How many picnic lunches did we eat on the square redwood table? How many games did we play, snow forts did we build? If I listen hard enough, can I hear adolescent voices calling for sugar and spice cookies or chocolate pudding? They are long gone, like the flowers and berries, existing only in photos and my memory. I wonder who will care about such pedestrian thoughts? Will they live on as ghosts in the masonry, the woodwork, the everyday life of this house, adding to the power of home and family.
Now, looking through the kitchen window, I see the result of almost fifty years of change. The little patio is no longer shaded by blue spruce, planted as seedlings on the hill where the Rose of Sharon and peonies once lived. They grew in their majestic blue beauty and died in less. The aging birch has spread its branches and taken over for the spruce. The branches dip and sway in the wind, reminding me to be as flexible. Underplantings of ivy, Bishop’s weed and sprinklings of Astilbe have fashioned a woodland-like setting. The area exists in the dappled sunlight that makes its way through the delicate green leaves of the birch. The blacktop is covered with running bond brick softened by mosses and dragon’s blood sedum. A strip of cement that must have been part of the foundation of that long ago garage marks the outside of a slender garden that casts roses up and over the neighbor’s fence. Those wild roses have found the small metal pergola and bench in the northwest corner of the patio and will no doubt fill its arches with blossoms in early July. The new bird feeder, which has successfully thwarted the squirrels’ attempts at larceny, is host to tens of small avian bodies every day. But the squirrels have to eat too, so we’ve tacked a feeder for the family that lives under the neighbor’s playhouse to the trunk of a spruce on the back edge of the yard. It’s lovely place, a garden of a settled older family, a busy life without children in tow.
I wonder too if my daughter will look out on a garden somewhere on some future date, reminiscing as I have about those who have gone before and the memories that still remain. The circle turns.
