My Home is Haunted with Life
What stories are living in the walls, under the tiles, in the window panes of your home?
It’s a common question- if these walls could talk, what would they say?
This year, over the holidays, my aunt and uncle (visiting from Denver) pointed out that our family has owned “our ancestral home” for 50 years. It’s the home my grandpa and grandma bought in 1974 when they moved to Tucson as he continued his career as a doctor in the Air Force. It’s the home my dad lived in as a 17-year-old, finishing up high school at the same school where I now go to swim laps once a week. It’s the home I visited as a child growing up first in Chicago, then Kansas City- a home I grew to associate with dusty browns and pale pinks, Jasmine and Aladdin sheets, my Grandma’s big fingers plucking out songs on the piano, the smell of melted cheesy toast.
It’s the home my family and I moved into when I was 14, much to my initial protest. We moved there at the encouragement of our grandma, having recently lost our grandpa- to be closer to her, and to continue caretaking this special place that had finally rooted the rootless moving that the military had demanded of my grandparents for over a decade. And ever since we did move in 2004, the home has been my parent’s to caretake- the place I always returned to when I was living abroad, the large dining room table where I now eat weekly family dinner with my family, the cozy fireplace my siblings, aunts, uncle, cousins come to visit. This home is a living entity, silent yet full of memory within its walls.
Photo by Egor Litvinov on Unsplash
I once saw an image of a house the earth was swallowing whole. It was entirely covered in vines. The wooden walls were broken down with time, and sweet mounds of dirt were piling up past the windows, across the floor. The image had a caption about how we might consider that every home must eventually go back to where it came from.
Every home, even the most modern, is made of earth. Bricks are made of clay, sand, shale, lime, fly ash (whatever that is) and other minerals. Wooden walls and doors and window frames come from the trees- here in the US, most frequently white pine, cypress, fir. The cement for floors are lime, silica, calcium; the tiles are ceramic (clay), porcelain (minerals and clay), or stone. Our windows are glass- sand, commonly quartz sand- mixed and fired with chemicals.
Look around your home– how many earthly materials begin to come forward when you pause to question their origin? What of the copper-painted brick, the brass door knob, the indigo blue fibers in the rug?
A birthday for Frank held at my parent’s home last year as the earth, water, and straw of the adobe bricks marvel at our ability to eat so much key lime pie
Every home holds stories. Every home is story. Homes keep secrets, like the late night make out sessions you didn’t want your parents to know about, or the disappeared bottles of vodka from high school parties. Homes tuck away the parental conversations that the kids aren’t meant to hear. Homes hold lovemaking; they hold heartbreaking.
Their walls listen as elders discuss a diagnosis- stomach cancer, advanced stages. The couch hugs that couple as they process how close Death is, and what that closeness feels like. The back patio remembers a wedding night- a first dance, loved ones telling stories of why you are loved, a mushroom-forest cake. The backyard cacti and velvet mesquite hold the whispers of ancestors, and the remnants of past: a 1980s Budweiser can, the bones of a beloved dog and hamster, the stretch marks of a saguaro grown tall.
And homes hold history before they became homes. The land that holds them– when did you last pause to consider who once walked across the same dirt 100, 300, 8,000 years ago? Who might have sat beneath shade or sought water in the arroyo that serpentines its way across a ridge? How many parents have kissed, children have laughed, grandparents have cried on this land? Which animals have been born here; which trees have died? Who has told someone they loved them while lying on this patch of the earth’s heartbeat- what language did they speak, and how did that love sound as it was buried in the ground like a seed?
Part of Frank’s and my wedding at my parent’s house supported by the limb of Frida the Velvet Mesquite tree, May 2022
This Christmas morning, with my cousins and aunt and uncle, my family and I told stories of the memories the “ancestral home” holds for each of us to celebrate our 50 years of relationship with it. My grandpa’s laughing belly was called forth to the table; my grandma’s meticulous cooking plans were laid out across the kitchen counter. We felt the flap of mourning doves as we fed them bird seed again; felt the crinkle of pale childhood skin turning tomato red. My dad reflected how it always felt to be traveling somewhere, anywhere, in the world and to see Tucson listed on the airport departure list- to know that there was always a way back, here, to this living, breathing home that holds living, breathing memories.
There is much I could write about this holiday season, and I’m sure I will share more in the unfolding weeks- family rituals for Solstice, our deep questions around the meaning of Christmas, how to balance self care and family time- and yet, tonight, I find myself honoring the gift and the deep responsibility of calling a home “home” for half a century. It is a privilege shared less and less these days as rising costs encourage selling, as family needs multiple, as we all grow older. And yet, that makes it all the more imperative to learn about the past, the deep history, of a home and its inhabitants- to not take such an entity for granted.
Christmas 2023 in my parent’s living room with the adobe bricks, the stone, the fibers, the spruce tree all participating
It felt, during that Christmas morning story share, that time disappeared for a while as we gathered together. We dined with the spirits of our ancestors; sensed the presence of those not-yet-born watching with curiosity. We were witnessed by the earth in the bricks, the fibers in the carpet, the memories in the wood— that beam that used to be a towering tree. I’m left reminded with the feeling that that life- earthy, natural, wild- is ever present and pulsing. In its stillness, it swells with memory and with momentum. And that, as caretakers with the privilege of owning or caring about such a place, we must over and over again give thanks, and remember to pay attention.
Christmas 2024: Frank and me preparing for the newest addition to our family while the quartz sand of the windows watches over us