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10/21/07 

Tomorrow, Monday, we will close on a home equity loan on our current house to help us buy our new house. On Thursday, we'll close on the house I inherited from my mother, which is right behind our current house and which I have rented out to a long string of tenants since my mother's death eight years ago. Her house will belong to somebody else. On Friday, we will close on the the dreamy new house, and it will be ours.

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My mother's house 1991-1999


Since my mother died I have never really dealt with cleaning out all her stuff. As tenants came and went, their mess just formed a new layer on top of the things my mother had left behind. (One of my very early tenants had to ask me if I would please clean out the refrigerator; it made me so sad to throw out jars of jam and things my mother had bought that I could barely bring myself to do it).

Now, of course, I am forced to clean out every last thing, and it's not easy. In the basement I had stored dozens of my mother's books. As I went through them today, I realized that most of them were books that her parents had left her: I remember seeing them in our basement in our Connecticut house as I was growing up. It was a fine small library, loaded with classics and other books of quality: complete works of Dickens, leatherbound editions of Shakespeare, interesting newer stuff, like John MacPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, and E.B .White's The Wild  Flag. I kept thinking maybe I should keep this book ..maybe I would read that book ..Then, being strong-minded (one of my mother's favorite expressions), I would repeat to myself Mark Twain's famous quote, " A classic is a book that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read." Out went all the books, some more mildewed than others.

My mother moved up here to Vermont in her early seventies to be near me. Her greatest  joy in her early years here was the lovely small post-and-beam house that she helped design. It's a beautiful, spare house, full of interesting angles and soaring ceilings. I have always loved the house, too, though as my mother became ill with Alzheimer's my feelings toward the house changed. My mother became creepy and paranoid, and the ultra-high ceilings began to feel cavernous and weird  to me. After being with my fearful mother, I was always glad to come back to our cozy, messy, low-ceilinged farmhouse, where life seemed safe and mundane.

When I'm in my mother's house now, it's a  time machine for me. I see the window my confused mother opened one winter midnight to try to let me into the house, after she'd called me to tell me she had no idea who or where she was. I enter the downstairs bathroom and am transported to the summer afternoon when I washed my mother's hair for her right before I took her to the hospice. I go into the room that was her bedroom, open the closet door, and remember the wrapped Christmas presents I found there when I was moving out her clothes after she'd died.  For me, the house is haunted.

Haunted or not, it's hard to let go of this beautiful little house. But letting go of the house will enable us to buy the cheerful new  house on the mountain, the gorgeous house that will be ours in just a few days. Letting go of the house will enable me to let go of the painful memories I have of my mother, and remember her kindness, her wit, her intelligence. She loved spare, modern architecture -- how she would love our new house!

 
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