The House
Dad’s house. August 23, 2020.
This week, with reluctance and relief, I said goodbye to a piece of my childhood. My realtor hated to miss out on this mysteriously hot COVID housing market and I knew the house was only decaying every day it sat uninhabited. The backyard flora, untrampled, had woven into a beautiful and ominous wall of vegetation with tendrils of ivy and blackberries creeping ever closer to the back door. They had found the basement window, left slightly ajar, and pushed their way inside, the living ends grazing the warm oak windowsill, yet to reach the steel barrels and silicone tubing that had hoped to become a brewing system. The facade was tamer – gently sloping grassy hills framing a concrete driveway with a jagged crack running horizontally across the middle, shaded by an overgrown maple tree whose gray-green bark matched the worn exterior paint peeling off the vertical wood siding.
I don’t remember anything before the house. Stuck behind cellophane in family photo albums, there’s evidence of an apartment where my dad walked around in his underwear and fell asleep with me on his chest, but that was before I could form memories. I remember being two years old and running down the hallway, wearing my dad’s green t-shirt as a nightgown. I remember being four years old and returning from a hike on a hot, rocky trail, where my mom had gotten frustrated and I had fallen asleep on the way home, waking up just as we pulled into the driveway. I remember one day running away to the far corner of the backyard and refusing to come inside for a very long time, but I don’t remember why.
After my mom found a new partner and my sister joined the Marines, it was down to me, my dad and our sweet husky mix, Simon. Like most teenagers, I felt suffocated by the constancy and entrenched power dynamics of my home, so I desperately clawed my way to freedom as soon as possible, asserting my independence by rarely visiting, though I attended a university only 20 miles away. I eventually moved across the country and my dad and Simon, as ever, stayed in the house.
My dad was very predictable; he exuded earthy qualities that gave the impression that perhaps he was never born, but simply walked out of the Virginia wilderness one day with a hunting rifle and a pouch of chewing tobacco, fully formed. He liked to travel, meet new people, exchange ideas, but he loved coming home. He loved a mocha from his own espresso machine. He loved his spot on the garish red microfiber sofa, next to the rips and drool stains where Simon, who was not supposed to be on the furniture, parked himself after Dad went to sleep. He loved his cluttered basement brewing lab full of half-finished projects and his enormous collection of science fiction novels and DVDs from the $5 bin at Walmart.
He loved airplanes, as evidenced by the numerous paintings and prints of various aircraft in every room of the house, and he knew from the age of 5 that he wanted a career involving them. He graduated from Penn State in 1986 with an aerospace engineering degree and landed his dream job with The Boeing Company in 1990. He worked 40 hours a week there, sometimes more but rarely less, for 28 years, eventually earning the rank of Senior Technical Fellow, which, without delving into the tedious particulars, is a very big deal. He always answered his work phone the same way, with a slightly stern “Structures. Cregger,” which served the dual purpose of efficiency and discouragement, making him sound very busy and therefore less susceptible to frivolous inquiries. But his voice always took on a levity and warmth as soon as he knew it was me on the other end of the line.
I never thought twice about moving across the country because my dad, with his espresso machine, ugly couch and colossal media collection, was immutable. The same overbearing monotony that had sent me packing was a godsend on the rare occasion that I gave in to my desire to click my heels together and come home. My dad would pick me up from the airport with light and enthusiasm in his eyes, Simon in the back seat panting out the window. We’d take a long, conversational drive across the industrial valley, waiting to be greeted by the cool, earthy smell of the nearby woods as we pulled into the driveway, tucked away and forever preserved in the peaceful cul-de-sac of a thoroughly middle-class suburban neighborhood.
My dad went first, at the unexpected age of 54, and then Simon followed two months later, at the ripe age of 17, and I took refuge in the house for nearly a year. Even with the addition of my personal effects, a rowdy, young German shepherd and my future husband’s overnight bag, its disposition remained largely unchanged. Every corner was stuffed full of dusty relics and shiny pieces of ideas that would never finish forming in my dad’s mind. He and Simon were the soul of the house and after they passed, I felt like a ghost trying to animate a body that wasn’t my own and languishing under the weight of it. Moving out lifted some of the weight, but none of the ambivalence, and the house remained at once a childhood sanctuary and a burdensome memento mori.
The next ten months were a tricky hopscotch of unfamiliar, frustrating and wonderful milestones that I conveniently allowed to take precedence over the house. I quietly indulged in the luxury of time, grieving and preparing. Finally, with my realtor waving money in front of me, I surmounted the dread and recruited my husband, mom, best friend and several junk hauling services to help me empty the house. Thus began weeks spent dragging pieces of my dad out of dusty closets, crying over sweaters, sweating over mountains of floppy disks and VHS tapes, pausing occasionally to gawk at the gutted nakedness of drawers and cabinets, emptied and hanging open.
The unrelenting bulk of material made me ruthless, stuffing souvenirs and memorabilia indiscriminately into donation boxes, refusing to fall prey to the same sentimentality that filled the house to bursting in the first place. I kept plenty of useful items – brewing equipment, hand tools – but some frivolous ones were also spared the garbage heap. Thinking of my future child, who will bear their grandfather’s name, I held onto a box of cassette tapes and a boombox with which to play them, along with some puzzles and photographs. I told myself the rest wasn’t my karma, not my fault it was there in the first place, as I recklessly tossed heaps of college coursework and assorted metal hardware into the giant dumpster parked over the crack in the driveway.
On the August new moon, a Wednesday, I drove to a title office located next to my high school. I panicked the whole way there that maybe I’d forgotten some important piece of information or paperwork and the deal wouldn’t go through, but ten minutes after arriving at the office, I stumbled, breathless, out into the daylight with a packet of paperwork clutched under my arm and the promise of a check in the mail. We were still, at that point, two junk hauls, one U-Haul and four SUV loads away from the final day I’d step foot in the house.
As hesitant as I was for that day to come, heaving and sorting through decades of family history had left me more gutted than the house, which seemed to cling to its clutter, fighting to keep its identity by refusing emptiness. Beneath the tender memories was some unrelenting quagmire, mingling the house’s decrepitude with my own grief, slowing time and making even the simplest tasks feel monumental. Every plume of dust that stung my throat, every pile of crumpled spiders behind a bookcase, every stranger who saw the state of my childhood home and quietly, or openly, made assumptions about the person who lived there, fed the stagnation. The quagmire followed me home, bogging down my feet as I walked to the car to face another day of clearing the house and leaving me exhausted by the day’s end, emotionally incapable of any dinner more complicated than a packet of ramen.
The prospect of getting the house in order, a great upheaval, certainly played a part in my dad’s decision to stay there for 26 years. From time to time, he showed me stone castles in Scotland or flats in Melbourne, beautiful places he might like to live, but I think a sense of responsibility and love for his family is what, more than anything, tied him to the house. He knew he was the enduring cornerstone and beating heart of our clan of otherwise volatile personalities, eternally kind and dependable. After he left, the house, suffused with his spirit, adhered tightly to its duty as a neutral zone, family archive and a place we could always find home. It took three weeks and nearly $3000 in junk removal fees to strip the house bare and even then, the bedroom paint colors and particular carpet stains were still telling their stories.
On the last day, the landscapers were already working. I peeked around the side gate to see that the wall of overgrown flora had been reduced to a lifeless blanket, laid out all the way to the far corner of the yard. A small, controlled fire crackled in the center. I walked inside through the garage door and stood still in the basement, letting the room recite its stories, then gently interrupting to say goodbye. I did this with each room. I took a final bathroom selfie. I tried to photograph the facade, but it was completely obscured by the maple tree, which, without my noticing, had grown taller than the house and nearly as wide. My husband, who is friends with our realtor, told me they took down the tree the next day.
My mom, my sister and I have our own homes, due in part to the financial support we received after my dad passed. We are more mature and agreeable now, his death having aged and bonded us, illuminated the importance of family that he saw so clearly all along. We no longer need a manifest cornerstone, a beating heart, because we carry a piece of his heart in each of us. Relieved of its duty, the house is just a house now, soon to be filled with someone else’s memories.
