Presentations: Gwen Hatley Whiting

Harvesting Home

My car makes a wide arc into the narrow drive, automatically navigating the two boulders on either side. I’ve made that turn so often I could do it in my sleep and probably often have. Sliding smoothly between the steep embankments, I stop next to the cracked and sloping sidewalk. There she is, this home of my childhood, rising before me in her shabby elegance.

I think of her as feminine, because that was the form of energy that inhabited her for the entirety of my youth: aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great aunts, sisters and cousins. When the clan gathered, we were more women than men by a long shot. Her windows dirty and the roof missing a few shingles, she resembles a dowager, slightly disheveled and down on her luck, but no less regal and sturdy in her demeanor, standing there in the waning, late autumn sun.

I come to pay homage one last time before her connection to our family is severed and she becomes another family’s safe haven. There is an aura surrounding her, a bright Joseph’s coat of possibility, as if she is preparing herself for the new adventure.

I know I am romanticizing this solid structure of wood, frame and brick. But in my childhood, she was the receptacle of my dreams, the holder of my fantasies. Always kind, never judging, she simply held my hopes in her quiet solidity and waited for me to discover my own uniqueness.

I want to drink of her healing, calming spirit one more time, to retrieve those hopes and dreams and memories before her new family begins to create their own and push ours out from under her watchful, loving gaze.

Closing my eyes and breathing in the smell of the lilacs blooming on the old, gnarled bush just off the sagging front porch helps me slow down the surging mélange of images and memories. The scraggly bush with her scented blooms brought delight and hope to our lives after each hard winter. I feel the balm even now, soothing my anxious remembering. I step onto the lopsided porch, peopled with sprightly memories. Over there is my ten-year-old self, jumping off a foot-high ledge, landing wrong and breaking the bone in my right foot. At the back, next to the slanting window wall, huddled together under a precariously constructed blanket fort, are my three sisters and I, listening to the crashing, rumbling thunderstorm, scaring each other with stories until we run into the house in terror of ourselves. That window on the left shatters with the impact of my oldest sister’s body being shoved into it by the sister next in line, in a dispute over something long forgotten. And over there, behind that pillar, I am crouching with pale white face, hoping I won’t be included in my father’s punishing wrath.

The memories crowd around me as I move to the front door and struggle with the cantankerous knob that confounds me now as in the past. Entrance to our home was accompanied by many a muttered oath in the face of the knob’s perplexing puzzle. It insists on opening only if turned in one direction, but that direction is always elusive.

In the living room, my gaze falls on the brick fireplace, once wooden until the fire that sent us out into the snowy winter night; on huge bay windows whose light bathed both wonderful and painful times without prejudice; on the staircase, up and down which I had alternately trudged, run, tripped, fallen and even floated—it was a dream, they said, but I was sure that my body was floating in midair.

Voices reverberate off the walls: grandparents, mothers and fathers, sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins and friends, all competing for space: loudly summoning with laughter and anger, muffled with tears and concern, sharp with disapproval and demand, melodic in wishful fancy. We were never a quiet bunch.

When my nighttime terrors would propel me from sleep to an aching need for comfort, I would run to find my mother sitting at the old oak dining room table, listening to a lilting Irish melody, smooth sexy jazz or a classic baroque piece, reading the paper and smoking a cigarette--her only guilty pleasure. I didn’t realize, then, as I climbed up on her lap for brief solace, that this was her only opportunity to escape the cacophony of her daily life--and here I was, one more body invading her quiet space. She never once let on that it bothered her.

Walking through the house, I gather memories like a farmer bringing in a treasured, life-sustaining harvest. At the front door, my circuit complete, I turn, close the door and cross to the end of the porch. There I recall the lone figure of my father, sitting on the front steps overlooking the street, where he could always be found at the end of each day. We spent many a late evening sharing our thoughts while pretending we were watching the cars. There were so few times that I was able to see the soul of this man, I treasure now this tiny gem of remembered experience.

Driving away, I take a final look at my childhood home, where life wasn’t always safe or easy, but where I never doubted the depths of passion and love that challenged my family to go forth into the world. As I turn my face to the road in front of me, my longing eye catches what I think is one last wave of goodbye from my father, but when I look again, there is only an empty step.