Every time I come back, the house has changed a bit more.
My return from the first year of undergraduate was unspectacular. My parents had just divorced and my old room, the room I shared with three sisters, was full of boxes-- my mother's attempt to deal with the mess we'd left behind after heading off to college. I slept in my sister's bed, since mine was covered and blocked off by the boxes. My sister stayed with my father who'd moved out to live in my late grandfather's eastwood home.
By the summer, the room had been gutted, our leavings boxed and sealed away in plastic in the basement. My mother worked to get a heated water bed, queen sized, and new dressers. Knicknacks started tiptoeing in, shelves and stained glass. I slept in the nap room and lived out of my laundry basket.
It was two summers like that before the renovations began in earnest. My father got married and moved in with his new wife, leaving behind the failing house in eastwood. Back at the blue house, where I'd grown up, the bathroom was redone by my mother's new boyfriend.
The old bathroom had a laundry chute, a worn white door with the temporary tattoo of a green owl. The shoot would often get clogged with towels, and we'd use bent coat hangers and broom handles to jab at the clots of laundry.
It had a medicine cabinet with floury tracings on the top center, swung out to the right. Tan, speckled sink top. I'd sit on it to wash my feet after running around in sandals in summer, when my heels were too black to take to the sheets. Blue checked curtains, swirled blue tiles, white trim. The lock on the door was simple. It could be picked from the outside with a little patience and a tiny screwdriver.
The new bathroom is coral, with stone tiles inspired by my mother's trip to hawaii... her first time really flying anywhere I think. I remember her calling me from hawaii, just to tell me about how they left a chocolate on her pillow. How she'd bought a coconut and watched a man slash it open with a machette so she could drink straight from the shell.
I didn't come home for the next summer. I'd found research work at the university that paid better than tending the gas station at night. I did visit for a few weeks though, and I helped lay the stone foundation for the addition that would double the size of the first floor.
By Christmas, the beams were in and the walls stood. They worked by floodlight to tile the floor in green-gray, black and red.. a matching backsplash, french doors to a "family room" with a fireplace..and a new laundry room, with a drain built right into the floor.
There are pictures of my mother's boyfriend taking a sledgehammer to the old kitchen wall climbing through and tearing it, breaking it down to unite the space. There are pictures of nearly everything.
That spring, they reshingled the roof and repaneled the house, trading in the bright blue aluminum siding for a muted maroon grey. That summer, I did come home. I was heading to graduate school and couldn't keep my research position. The kitchen was done, as was the family room and laundry room. I still slept in the nap room.
By christmas, the stone fireplace started to form. They'd found and split the rocks, some from hawaii, and some from my mother's recent trip to maine. She'd wanted to dig up a stone from my grandfather's driveway--one of the huge regtangular rocks he had taken from Acme, when he worked there--but my father wouldn't allow it, and my mother wouldn't just take one.
Finally, they've repainted and furnished the nap room. New carpet, new dresser, new lamp. Fuchsia trim. Yesterday they started work on the last room left, the toy room. And as of today, there's nothing in this house that is as I remember it. Even the red star in the basement is gone, paneled over after rainwater pooled in the cellar, damaging much of my boxed posessions.
It's only recently that I've tried to be less selfish about this. It made me feel... a little bitter and homeless I suppose. I never thought enough about what it might make my mother feel.
In dreams, houses stand as the body or the self. That's Jungian, freudian... but stay with it.
I don't know how hard it was to make the choices that she has; the choices that tied her down, like staying home to care for the kids, us, me, and the choices that opened her up, like the divorce.
But I have to respect that she's just trying to rebuild.
This all comes to me via a photography assignment called "spaceship." We're to pretend we're heading to space, in a white capsule with no decorations, no mirrors, and we can take ten photographs with us. Ten personally meaningful photographs. I thought about photographing while visiting home over this spring break but what's left to photograph?
