Posted on by Elizabeth Kendall · 2 Comments

New Old House

After dinner, my husband and I have established a new summer ritual.

When the day has cooled down, we walk down the block to check on the renovations to our house.

The house is an unassuming 1920s Southern cottage – charming but needing an overhaul.

And fresh new landscaping.

And so tonight we uncoil the garden hose and water. I soak the young saplings and sprinkle the leaves – the oak and magnolia are especially parched from the incessant drought.

The dry mulch glugs down the water.

We will tend these trees, but we’ll never see the expanse of their potential. Isn’t that a lesson in humility?

We bought this place as a downsize, but then felt like we needed to upsize just a little (master bedroom, bath) because it was a tiny bit too tight.

And it’s been over two years of planning and construction.

This is a new beginning for us, like a nascent bed nestled into a larger grove of time that will outlive our old bodies.

A new beginning for us, a nascent bed nestled into a bigger grove of time that will outlive our old bodies.

Our contractor says it will be like we are stepping into a brand new house at the end of July. This excites me, but I know better.

I know we’ll bring everything along with us – we are laden with years.

The memories of our first home in North Carolina:

Being pregnant and wanting to fill every inch of space with life. Our daughter coming and then our son.

And then we outgrew it. So there was a move to Durham, to a bigger, old pink house.

And filling it with friends and family.

And ticking off the milestones – growth spurts and birthdays and Christmases with huge trees. And beloved new pets who were with us for awhile and then gone.

Traditions, old and new.

All of this will be unpacked.

I think about that expansion of growth and now this contraction of getting older.

And how, in many ways, our needs have downsized too.

Yet I’ve never downsized the need to fill the nooks around us with safety and comfort and joy, and beautiful things.

So, after watering the trees, I go inside and try to visualize where different pieces of furniture will go. The old couch, recovered several times. My mom’s marble-topped antique washstand.

And my husband’s sleek new lounger that will fit perfectly in the corner.

And then my mind drifts to my dad.

One of the last pieces of furniture that he used was his old recliner. His little apartment got smaller and smaller until it was just the chair and the bed, and that was all.

How little we actually need as physical bodies.

Our next house will have all of the assists – hand bars in the shower, no second story steps and metal railings leading up to the porch.

True, there is a new cedar hot tub, but it is scaled down. Gone are the days of our son’s late night after-soccer parties.

It’s just me and my husband, a hot tub party of two.

We’ll climb in carefully; we don’t want to risk it.

One thing I am super excited about is the fact that I will finally have an office/study. My only fear is that now that I have a room of my own I will dry up and never write again.

Sigh.

When the architect asked me about my dreams for the new space, they pencilled in a library, without me even telling them about my writing.

I guess some of my seams (or books) were showing that day.

At any rate, I’m thrilled.

But mainly, I find myself worrying about balancing our new smaller reality with our actual needs as a whole family.

Will Thomas have his own spot to play? Will Lewis and Laura feel at home?

Or will it be too small for me and Mac, once he’s retired and home (underfoot) full time?

And for myself – will I miss the larger pieces of furniture that used to anchor me in the present?

The desk stuffed with the children’s school projects? The closets of old calendars and journals and Halloween costumes?

Can abundance be found in small spaces?

Anyway, I salvage what I can and pitch the rest. Similar to what my sisters and I did in my father’s apartment after he died.

And I wonder if my writing desk will be one of my last possessions in the end? Doubtful.

But life is a series of parsing and whittling and curating.

And letting go. Always letting go.

And I believe, in our lifetimes, our souls inhabit many houses. And we drift between them in memory.

I remember talking to my Dad over the last years, and how articulated his memory was of events from long ago.

It was like his brain was opening up and strewing petals from the flowers of his past. And it felt normal and natural to speak of these things that had never seen the light of day but here they were.

But today, as I write, I know that I’m simply living here, now, in this cruddy, run-down rental home.

Impatient, stressed about the actual move, and just itching to get on with the packing.

And waiting, with these random thoughts and daydreams – until the new house is ready at the end of the month.

We’ve planned meticulously for this transition, but who can predict the future?

Because after the move – then what?

Posted on by Elizabeth Kendall · 1 Comment

Summer Heat

This oppressive heat makes us feel prickly and wild.

We are edgy, and our tempers flare.

We try to limit ourselves to cool spaces. Driving in our air conditioned cars rather than walking a few blocks.

Our dogs lie stretched across the hardwood floors all day, trying to absorb the coolness from the night before.

And outside there are empty cicada husks clinging to the underside of my birdbath.

It’s as if they abandoned hope halfway up and then gave up the ghost. Screaming skeletons in the night.

And then today I saw several live ones struggling on the pavement. They were belly up, like they had lost their minds and just given up on the trip.

And at night, the white owls stay silent while the young foxes scream.

To me, Summer often feels like this kind of fevered dream. Something to be gotten through.

It’s just the way it is in the South.

And tonight, I think of my Dad, and this enduring sadness that settles like the humid air.

The grief feels less sharp now, but his presence hovers in the ether.

I remember summers from the 1970s.

The fireflies every night at dusk, no fail.

The cool sidewalks under bare feet while taking a late night walk down to the corner store.

The frigid water in the city swimming pool. Getting goosebumps coming out – wrapping a thick towel around my sunburned shoulders. Snack bar ice cream sandwiches and Sun-In.

Riding to Dairy Queen on the family station wagon’s tailgate, swinging our dusty legs, loving the illicit freedom.

No air conditioning, but shades drawn in the bedroom during the day to keep a bit of cool.

Nighttime was a reprieve from the sun, nature quietly exhaling, and the dusky shadows whisking away the afternoon’s sticky air.

And memories of entire days surrendered to reading in my bedroom when I was twelve. Reading all of Agatha Christie’s mysteries and To Kill A Mockingbird.

I would stay in there all day, marinating, ruminating – in an incubator that lives within me still.

The heat slayed us sisters but we had the sense to give in. We knew to stop racing around and to just lie on our beds slurping popsicles and playing endless rounds of Rack-O.

But the days were too long – there was just too much time to think about things.

Wondering about my old friends left behind. Fretting about moving to a new town, with a new school – and who would be my new best friend?

My dad is such a star in this slideshow:

The summer of 1974 vacationing at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. We had the entire three months to swim and bake on the beach before we moved to the city.

He was so relaxed and fun.

He would go into town and buy dozens of blue crabs to crack open and pick apart – served with corn on the cob dripping with butter. All of us around that splintery picnic table on the wide front porch.

And wading out into the Pamlico sound, digging with our feet down into the mucky sand, extracting the prized clams.

Later, Mom steaming them for dinner, served up with homemade cocktail sauce.

Dad was busy during the day writing his book in the upstairs attic, and man it was hot up there. I think Mom wanted him out from under foot during the day, and so she sequestered him.

And as I write, I think of him there, writing.

Sweating in that heat, in a fervor of creativity.

That summer sandbagged us, and held us pinned in stasis until the fall when school would start up.

By then, my sisters would quit playing with Barbies. And I had learned how to use a pink electric razor.

Like the cicadas, we were ready for new bodies.

And hopefully, when school started, our summer wildness would tamp down and we’d be civilized enough to sit indoors at a desk all day.

No doubt, that last summer was the end of our childhoods, but those younger selves remained baked into us forever.

Today I catch these moments and hold them like an insect in golden amber.

Because Dad is still here.

And if I go upstairs and close the blinds and lie down, I can recall so much more.

Past summers of joy, and all of the times he wanted us to have fun – waffle cones on the boardwalk, trips to the local bookstore, ghost stories in a thunderstorm.

And now this summer of sadness.

I can bear it because I have these memories. They are like a cool washcloth laid across the forehead.

They sooth me as I lie in bed, fighting sleep, scratching at chigger bites under the covers.

But still, like the old adolescent me, I fret about so many things.

And then, late into the night, I let the cooler air slowly settle around me, and I think about those summers.

So much of the world I didn’t understand back then, and that I don’t understand even now, after all these years.

But the one thing that remains constant is change.

Aging bodies, the years moving on – summer to summer.

The world spins, the planet burns, and here I am, remembering my dad and letting that be enough.

I have changed so much, all of us have, and yet we are also the same.

And I think: can these things that are temporal also be eternal?