Out in Lockbourne, there is a house anchored in my memory. It was an old white farmhouse, set back from the road. Behind it sat an unused garage, a chicken coop converted into a storage shed with shelves for antique glassware and ceramics, a worktable for canning. The woman who lived there—Margaret—was energetic, in her late seventies, a widow, the mother of a close family friend. In her late teens, my mother actually lived in that house for a short period, when, in another story for another time, her own home became unlivable.
For now, let’s just say it had something to do with race. And let’s also say that Margaret was a kind person, small and strong, and I think it was something about the quiet of her home and the land around it that has stuck with me. I don’t remember seeing a TV or a radio there. I remember an Australian shepherd darting between the black walnut trees, a patio where my parents and their best friends lounged in the shade, and laughed about stories I didn’t understand. There was an old black cast iron water pump that hadn’t worked since before I was born, but every time I gave it a few rusty cranks, hoping irrationally that just once water would rush out, and perhaps more that everything around the pump would look like it did fifty years ago when they bought the place and first fixed it up, that her husband, long gone and buried, would be there in his overalls spattered in whitewash, that my rural surroundings would mix with the science fiction in my dad’s comic books, and I’d travel through time without moving.
When I was thirteen, for twenty-five dollars every week or so, I mowed the several acres of grass on the property. It took about four hours, including about forty-five minutes of trimming with the push mower, around pines in front yard and two rows of birch out back, the gnarled and knotted trunks of apple trees behind the garage, the fringe of weeds shooting out from the foundation of the old chicken coop. In my Walkman, I listened to Illmatic, Tical, the Best of Van Morrison, both “Bring the Pain” and “Brown-Eyed Girl”—that looped hum, that descending guitar line at the end of the second verse—striking me with such a sense of mystery. How do humans create sounds this sad, this haunting, this beautiful?
I once saw a wolf spider nearly the size of my hand then, suspended on its threads between two of the pines out front. Our mutt Tippy once chased the Australian shepherd around the house for so long on a summer day she nearly died from heatstroke. The house looked old and smelled old and when I was five or six years old I wondered how she slept there all by herself every night. Wasn’t she scared? Night is so dark in the country. Even at thirteen, I couldn’t imagine ever living by myself, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
After I finished mowing the grass, I’d take off my headphones, call my dad on Margaret’s rotary phone to come pick me up. I’d then sit in the pastel Formica kitchen with her for a bit, while she made tea or tidied up leisurely. We’d talk about what she was up to, which was a lot. At eighty, she was volunteering at the nursing home to take care of people, most of whom were younger than her. While she didn’t drive, she had plenty of friends who did, and they’d roll out together for bingo or shopping or eating at the old MCL on Hamilton Road. Whenever she could she’d travel with friends out of state to watch Elvis impersonators. I remember seeing pictures of her at seventy-five years old, sitting in the front row, her favorite fake Elvis singling her out, her cheeks blushing, and my memory of that photo remains a reminder of how alive people can be, doing what they enjoy, for as long as they are able to.
Several years ago, I went to Margaret’s wake, and I don’t remember how or why she died. She was in her nineties, and so I think it was what we call natural causes. I heard the back patio with the table and chairs in the shade had been removed, the back yard paved over so the new owner can park his several concrete trucks. The house now only exists in my memory, and certain images and sounds bring it back to life. I just taught the film Fried Green Tomatoes in my “Heroines and Heroes” class. That film always reminds me of the thick, green heat that weighed down the summers where I grew up, of those brick houses where time softened, environments where there was little indication that you were living in the late twentieth century. It reminds me of the humidity, the apples and apple butter, the groundhog holes in the football field, the strawberries straight off the stem, the creek wading, the dark and imperceptible transition from aimless adolescence to idle young adulthood, from illegal fireworks and petty vandalism, to other things.
The first couple of Iron & Wine albums, The Creek Drank the Cradle and Our Endless Numbered Days, also carry something of this mythical simplicity, with kids hiding whiskey bottles in wells, diving into brown rivers, misplacing jars of seeds, a young man pouring oil into a bath, scenes that evoke the danger and silence and rushing nature of places like where I grew up, places where you step over mossy rocks and resurrection ferns and for a moment can’t quite tell when you are, or whom you might run into in that still wilderness. Of course, little of what I remember remains, but it was always so. The houses in my memory are built upon the ghostly forests and fallow fields recalled by someone else, someone older. At Margaret’s, I didn’t know it then, but I was always walking and running through a palimpsest of times; it is only the irresistible deceptions of memory that make that place seem to have ever been only one thing, existing in only one moment.