One Year

I’ve glanced down to check the date.  I sensed that there was some sort of significance in it. And when I saw it, I immediately knew – today marks exactly one year from the time when we began working on the house.

This day last year however was not at all about the house. It wasn’t even a thought until later on when I was driving home with my mum.

We went to visit my grandpa’s old Dodge truck that had been sitting in the field there. After his passing, it started to become part of the landscape, tires easing into the ground below, rust creeping its way under the body.  No one to return to it. That is, until we decided to see if it was salvageable enough for me to drive it, hauling my dreams of owning a furniture refurbishing business one day with it in its bed.

Like that worn down blue truck, the house as well had been abandoned. My grandmother had since grudgingly moved to a small ranch near my parents where she could be better looked after. The home where our family would spend shivering cold winter evenings in celebrating Christmas Eve with mountains of gifts & wrapping paper strewn about was then left without a soul to inhabit it for almost two years.

I can still remember glimpses from memory of how I felt in that house as a child. Walking down the long creaky-floored hallway to the bathroom with nothing but the dim illumination of the small brass light fixtures mounted at either end.  The feeling along with it has stayed with me. The eyes of the man in the painting at the top of the steps always watching my every move. The chill in the air never quite relinquishing its grip. It was an unusual place to me as a child, but nonetheless one of wonder & adventure. I’d never image in a million years that this home I describe to you now is the one I will be moving into in less than one month.

It all started with that truck though that day. And curiosity, I suppose at first, is what brought us to the door of the house, wanting in – finally.

You see, those days of family gatherings came to an abrupt end over ten years ago. Although it didn’t seem so transparent then. It was a slow fade, as if the time we’d spent out there were pages gingerly turned in a thick, chalky story book until eventually it was clamped shut, a plume of dust, no more to see. The end.

Until we opened its age-old door & looked inside. I say look first, without stepping inside because there was nowhere to step. I only share this as to remember where we started from. The undertaking that we were about to embark upon.

It was then when it registered to us as to why we were no longer welcome in that house after so many years. It was because of the state that had been steadily accumulating with each passing day. Piles growing taller, tunnels forming like mazes all around.

The house had become a dwelling for rodents and of thousands and thousands of pounds worth of discarded items. ‘Hoard’ is but a word to describe its incommunicable state of affairs.

My mum & I drove away with reverberating thoughts bouncing around in our minds and consequent words tumbling out of our mouths. All of which generally landing on the bottoming-out of all questions: “Why. . .how?”

We returned stupefied with the newly found information about the true condition of my grandparent’s home. What would eventually be its fate? No one in the family wanted to see it sold & neither had the time nor energy that it would take to clean it out & make it inhabitable once again.

As we drove further from that house though, something drew me to it like a magnet.  Something about the land & the pond and the significance that it held for us as a family. Though sounding absurd in my mind, I eventually allowed the words to quietly escape my lips, “What if Gavin and I could fix it up and move there someday?”

. . .to be continued.