|
Navigation |
|
|
|
Living Amidst
the 'Ghost Houses' of Our Lives
By Stacy Jones, June 18, 2005 |
Each
time I drive past a certain house on Highway 72, I wonder about
it.
When I make the hour and a half
trek from my mother’s house in Guys to my house in Memphis,
I pass by it, as it sits on the right.
The house reposes, a small quaint
white farmhouse-style with black shutters. No activity abounds
around the house, and the weeds are starting to overtake it.
At one time, a tire swing hung
from the large oak in the front yard. But I haven’t noticed
of late if that tire swing is still hanging.
I try, for one, to imagine the
child who might have once enjoyed this tire swing. I see a child
not too unlike myself when I was a youngster, maybe wearing cutoff
jeans shorts, running barefoot, sporting a host of scrapes and
bruises from cavorting in the woods. But having the time of his
or her life, nevertheless. Indeed, a tire swing connotes happiness.
But there are no children here,
no parents. Only the sense of what might have once been.
I always remain fascinated about
empty or abandoned houses. I want to know about the lives that
once inhabited them. A lot of things happened in those lives,
and it is almost as if I can feel them when I drive past those
homes.
This week Don Harold Lawrence,
a local grief columnist, published a piece that speaks to this
issue. Lawrence writes of taking his son to his own grandparents’
home in Milan, Tennessee, after his grandfather died in 1973
and his grandmother passed in 1987.
The house was deteriorating, falling
prey to the elements of nature, as all things will. But inside
the house, remnants of these two lives remained.
Inside the dining room closet were
jars of canned vegetables. A few boxes of letters and memorabilia
remained. And in the bathroom, their toothbrushes hung beside
the sink, as if they might have been patiently waiting for their
owners to return and use them.
Lawrence’s son noted to his
father that it was almost as if they had abducted. He described
the house as a “ghost house,” an interesting and apt
way to characterize the situation.
I’m sure the very house in
which I grew up once had this feeling to my mother.
In 1992, my father, who had suffered
from heart disease for 14 years, succumbed. He died in May. Then
my grandmother, who lived next door to us and was always at our
house, died in July. My brother Greg moved out later that summer,
got his own apartment in Corinth. And in August, the youngest
of my parents’ four children, I left for college in Memphis.
Although Greg and I were in and
out of the house on occasion, I’m sure at first this absence
must have made my mother feel as though she were living in a
ghost house. She had married at 16, had her first child, my brother
Loyd, at 17, and ever since, she had been surrounded by her family.
Now we were all gone. Those people
with whom she had shared the majority of her life were either
living somewhere else or had passed on. But my mother is a strong
woman, and eventually she adjusted.
Another house that has special
meaning in my life and now feels like a ghost house belongs to
my Aunt Bessie and Uncle T.K., who lived in the Gravel Hill community
just south of Selmer for many years.
They both went to live in the nursing
home in March 2004, and Uncle T.K. died last July. Every now
and then when I am headed north to Selmer, I take time to pull
off and drive past their house.
It brings back, as Lawrence says
in his column, an “avalanche of memories.” I spent
many evenings, especially Friday or Saturday nights, at their
house, along with my parents and grandmother. Aunt Bessie would
often make pinto beans and cornbread, and after our meal, we’d
sit around laughing and talking, watching episodes of M*A*S*H
or Dallas or whatever happened to be on television that particular
night.
Driving by their house, I see Bessie’s
old flowerbeds, in which she used to take so much delight, now
languishing without her there to care for them. I cannot see
it from the road, but I think of her old chicken coop behind
the house, where I once loved to play.
Lawrence goes on to mention something
in his column that is both fascinating and frightening to think
about. One day the houses in which we live will all be dulled
by silence after our passing, after our generations are entirely
gone.
All of our Christmas gatherings,
the childhood laughter, the bright flicker of our lives will
be stilled. Our own houses will become ghost houses.
But, as he says, these feelings
in the midst of absence are all normal. They are a part of grief,
a part of the passing of time and sentiment for those individuals
who inhabit our lives for that short span of time.
(Stacy Jones, a Southerner,
is a Master of Fine Arts student in fiction writing at The University
of Memphis. She is a native of Guys, Tenn., and her columns,
which appear on Saturdays, are archived at Southern-Drawl.com.) |
|
|
