We Heart It
In the ’80s, my grandfather bought twenty acres of land. One spread was given to my mom’s cousin as a wedding gift, another was given to my mother after her wedding, and a third was given to my uncle when he married. A four mile runway was cleared out for my grandfather’s Cessna, he cut down trees for various trails that snaked through the woods, he built a hangar, beside it horse stables, and down beside the dirt road he built a small studio for his band to practice in. Beside it was a dip in the ground that filled with water when it rained. Their house sat perched in the middle of it all. In some ways, I considered it my home more than the house I lived in with my parents. But it wasn’t just the house — it was the land, everything on it. I wanted to live there some day.
But then my grandparents decided to sell. They showed a family from Florida around the land on their Gator. I resented their presence. This place was my family’s life, and I couldn’t believe they were giving it to someone else to have. I don’t remember the last night I spent there. I remember the tiled kitchen floor, the sleek wooden staircase, the mauve floral wallpaper, the bay windows around the dining room table that looked out onto the woods, the rusty red shed, and the wooden canopy that had stood there outside the window since I could remember. There was the garden in the back, and the tuft front yard where my cousin and I did running back-handsprings one Sunday evening during a family dinner.
Now another family is there. Large sheds have been put up for the owner’s car remodel business. They may or may not have already sold some of the land to other friends from the Sunshine State. The interior of the house is apparently unrecognizable. “You wouldn’t want to go in there now,” my Nana told me once. “The place suh mess.” So, I haven’t. “You need to get over that,” my mom has told me on numerous occasions when I grumble about the sell. It’s just that I wanted to live there. I truly wanted to live there. I think about it probably more than I should. I had plans for that place. They came together too late, after they’d long been moved in and my memories seemed to be erased with the creation of new ones. I look up the driveway at the place every time I go to home to visit my family. I can’t see anything hardly for all the trees, but I can hear them. Nails banging, boards stacking, things building. New life being put on old ground.
Since I knew my life there could never happen again, I went all out with my imagination. Well, as all out as a minimalistic-wannabe who fancies quaint, bucolic design can go. I would plant pine trees down either side of the driveway like my grandparents used to have entering their home. The motor home shed would go down, because I don’t have one, and frankly I thought it looked tacky in front of the garden. I would replace the vinyl siding on the house with gray stone, would pave a cul-de-sac in front of the garage with a stone fountain the middle. In the side yard by the bay windows that look in on the kitchen, I would put new vines on the wooden canopy, set up a lounge area underneath for reading, and maybe daydreaming, because we all know how I like to do that. I would keep the hangar for storage, and buy two ponies for the stables — buying one pony would just be cruel. The studio by the watering hole would become my writing studio. I would install a large window that would look out on what would become the pond, and there would be a bridge over which I’d cross to get there behind the stables. I’d wake up early to cook breakfast, be outside at 6:00 to care for the horses, do some writing until lunch, then when they got big enough, take the horses out to stretch their legs. I would get a black lab, and name him Luke after the first lab, who was also black, that I ever had. Maybe in the afternoon I would sit under the canopy with some tea and a book, and do some more writing before bed.
In my head it looks pleasant, idyllic, romantic. But all of those words, at least for me, are rooted in some kind of delusion. Yes, it sounds nice, but I know I would get lonely. Truth be told, I don’t spend a lot of time imagining myself there alone. I imagine a family: a husband, some children, my cat. I imagine noise and laughter and board games. Somehow, I imagined myself into a board gamer. My kids would play hide-and-seek behind the same tall, bulbous trees my cousins and I hid behind. They would do flips on the thick grass, take the horses out for a ride with their parents, and sit on the swing my grandfather installed beside one of the trails when my cousin Hannah died not long after her first birthday. It would be a new layer, but a restitched layer made from the same fabric.
Destiny does not always align with our dreams. I know this. But, I haven’t quite been able to part myself from this one. I want a Crosswicks. A Mortmain castle. I thought I could make my grandparents home something literary and memorable. I know — romanticist. Maybe even a little flighty in expectation. Like I said, they were daydreams, fantasies. I was going all out. But, that is what it would be. What it would be for me as my mind stands now. Which, might say something interesting about where my head is. Not good, not bad. Just interesting.