Leaving South Church Street

Mother was seventy-five and Daddy, eighty nine when they moved into the House. The neighbors laughed. For fifty-seven married years they had lived in the neat, stucco house Daddy built on Church Street. My sister and I were raised there, sharing a bedroom like we shared our bicycle, sharing dresser drawers and underwear. Countless winters we would stand over the open-air blowers to the furnace, leaving grubby handprints on the wallpaper behind us, our skirts bellowing out from the rising air. We lived, laughing and crowded together in every inch of the old house.

The furniture crowded in with us. There was tall, foreboding Victorian pieces with marble tops and curlicues, lions’ paws feet and deep mahogany finish alongside tacky 1920 pieces, (brand new when Mother, an 18 year old bride, and Daddy were married.) There was delicate, dainty china and porcelain, sharing space with Woolworth trinkets. The valuable and cheap compatible–like in our lives.

My sister and I were adults before I remember mother talking about a House. By that time Daddy had moved and removed every plant and tree in the yard. He had dug up and dug under and dug over every inch of ground. He had put down a rock terrace in the back yard. The side yard had been a croquet lawn, a chicken yard, a garden, and a circular drive at various times during my childhood. The rocky soil produced with a wild profusion and crepe myrtle trees grew tall. Ivy ate at the stucco. Flowering shrubs emitted a cloying sweetness. Cruder flowers like zinnias and Golden Glow grew everywhere, flaunting their bold colors. The yard bloomed in all seasons but like Eden, danger was there and when a ball would bounce into the underbrush, reaching to retrieve it, I would encounter the shining scales of a black snake. Or, skipping on the stones in the marsh behind the house I would come across a five-foot snake stretched full length in the sun. The beautiful and the frightening–compacted.

By this time too, more furniture had entered the house. Grandparents’ pieces and items from deceased aunts and uncles were somehow fitted into the already crowded space. Mother would laugh and say it was a magic house whose walls expanded to receive the ever-increasing pillage. It seemed so. A huge bureau of ancient lineage moved into the back bedroom and a magnificent sideboard into the tiny dining room. The amazing thing was, none of the old pieces would go. They would just move over, like a tired passenger on a crowded bus and share their space.

My sister and I were both married and living out of state when the house hunting began. Each visit home was punctuated with explanations about a new house on the market that we must go see. How I hated those excursions–the shiny, eager voice of the realtor going on and on–the walking up and down–the peering in closets–the poking–the probing and always the long list of reasons from Mother why the house was not right. Then, for months after, the recital of woes that the house had gone to another buyer. Oh, the grave error that had been committed, the great purchase that had gotten away. Until, as the time approached for another visit home, a new house was on the market.

By this time the wild untamed nature that always seemed so close in my childhood was winning the battle with the old house. On one visit home I saw a bold, green stalk, three feet high, growing out of the furnace register. How on earth was it living there? Seedlings blossomed in the eves. While washing dishes over the old sink I noticed an extremely healthy looking sprig of ivy actually pushing through from outside into the kitchen. I was reminded of the Saturday afternoon radio shows my sister and I use to listen to, “The Plant that devoured Chicago”, or some such title.

The plumbers were coming so often now that we considered them members of the family. No modern appliances were compatible with the plumbing of the old house so mother and daddy had no washing machine or dishwasher. Built in a day when clothes were taken in a basket to a shanty across town for outdoor washing and a maid to wash the dished was a given, the problem of plumbing conversion was insurmountable. Still, continually they made minor brief repairs as the foundations shifted and the old walls fell out of true.

Though Daddy, now retired, worked daily, nature was winning outside too. The wiry tufts of grass crumbling the rock terrace could not be controlled. Roots of long ago-planted shrubs hung on with a tenacity that would not be defied. The outside became as crowded with shrubbery, as the inside was with furniture. Daddy emerged each morning, like a frontiersman beating back the encroaching rain forests of South America. He fought all morning with perseverance, then collapsed in the crowded den at noon to watch “Days of our Lives”.

We thought, my sister and I, that this was how it would all end. We thought that the house hunting was a hobby without foreseeable closure and that Daddy would finally collapse clutching a stubborn weed or moving an entrenched rock.

But it was not so. One day on our yearly visit to the old home place Mother greeted us with two items of news. One, Daddy was in the hospital with a heart attack and two; they had bought a house. Not just a house but THE house and how magnificent it was!

It was outrageous. It was impractical. It was just right. The new house greeted us with open arms and we entered and knew Mother had found her dream..

The magnificent lawn was manicured and there was a formal rose garden in back. Instead of shaggy hemlocks there were glossy magnolia trees. A marble entrance hall with Greek columns and a sparkling chandelier was only the passageway to other rooms of treasure. Not only was there a washer and dryer and dish washer and freezer but, like a blob of whipped cream on hot apple pie, the plumbing was crowned with gold fixtures in all three of the bathrooms.

Daddy was out of the hospital on moving day and we all came to help–from Virginia, from Ohio, grandchildren from Maine and Texas–all came to move into the kind of home where Southerners, weaned on “Gone with the Wind”, feel they belong.

The moving men carried furniture and more furniture out of the little house and then they went back again for still more. Slowly the new house, the very big house, began to fill up. The furniture, so long cramped, seemed to breathe a sigh and stretch. The pieces fit into the niches of the new house as though the places were built just for them. The table was just the right size for the window. The chair fit exactly by the fireplace. It all moved from the tiny old house to the large new house. Like the story of the loaves and fishes, the furniture filled each room, with furniture left over for the large attic.

Daddy had a little trouble at first adjusting. When fall came and the yard was covered with leaves he looked with disdain at the neighbor who swooped the leaves up in a noisy vacuum. Daddy got out his old bent rake and bushel barrel and worked daily with the same vigor he always exhibited. He brought the old cedar swing with him and put it on the back patio alongside the new black wrought iron patio set. But as he sat in the swing he decided there was nothing of interest to look at in the immaculate, tame yard and he took to going back to the old house to sit and rock. He brought some of the Golden Glow with him and a multitude of iris. A distraught Nurseryman stopped one day and informed him he had planted the iris on top of two hundred imported tulip bulbs. But when spring came, the irises were rampant as usual and not one delicate tulip appeared.

Daddy was proud of the new house though. His few remaining cohorts from working days were given the grand tour and he presided, like a king in his palace, when all the grandnieces and nephews and second and third cousins came to celebrate his 90th birthday there.

Mother and Daddy lived magnificently for one year and nine months before Daddy had his massive stroke. Through those long weeks when Daddy’s life seesawed back and forth the new house comforted and sheltered our comings and goings. When Mother was alone during that period we knew she was all right the house was tight and the plumbing was working.

I think sometimes now with awe about their fool-hardy decision to move. Impractical–of course it was but I also feel pride that until the end they were pursuing and realizing their dream.