A place with story

The houses I was raised in had stories. I guess all houses do, but these were stories I knew, and mostly about people who were kin to me.

This history began when I was five and my sister and I came back from our temporary stay with Annie Casper in Youngstown, Ohio. Mom had rented a pretty little house next to Grandma and Grandpa and my Uncle Roscoe. We were there for close to two years. It was a delightful place and good solid house. It was in the city limits, but barely. Just beyond the house, the road turned from cobblestone to dirt.

My moon is in the twelfth house -- and I was born homesick for the past -- another life before this one. And this place I came to at age five was a place I already knew. Mists and cobblestones and woodfires and old ways. My grandma Hall in her long dark dresses and "fasten with a buttonhook" boots and her Sunday hats with a half veil. My Grandpa with his handlebar mustache singing old songs.

I'd been disoriented in Youngstown, staying with this religious woman named Annie Casper and her quiet as mouse husband named Stuart (I kid you not).

We came back in the predawn morning and got out of that car down below that last hill. Annie was afraid of hills and finally parked, could not face another terrifying hill to drive. Which was just right, of course, a gift to me from the Gods. I stepped out of that car barefoot (something Annie repeatedly spanked me for) because I knew I was home. My feet touched earth and cobblestone -- old stone that lay in the rolling river being smoothed out just so.

(That story is a microcosm. Feeling disoriented among the church folks and getting put-down for being me and then casting off the shackles and standing strong and connecting to earth.)

We came to a house and hill we'd known in this lifetime, and all the elements of other places I'd known in other lifetimes. Another gift from the Gods, letting me have a bit of the past -- seven years of it -- from age five to age 12.

Someone eventually bought that house and Mom performed some kind of practical magic and landed us on our own place up the road aways. She bought the place -- ten acres and a house. Can you imagine?

This house, too, had stories. The best story was that Mom had stayed there as a child, stayed with her Aunt and Uncle. Her Uncle raised peanuts and sweet potatoes there. He had two plow horses named Pat and Patty. He's the one who built the barn and the wellhouse. The Beech tree by the well was old when Mom was a kid.

The house had been built by a nineteen year old for his family, back about the time of the Civil War. It wasn't built according to any plan. The fellow cut the trees from the place, had them sawed at the mill and started building with a cellar house.

The cellar house door opened to what would be the back of the house. The room on top of the cellar house opened at ground level to the front -- but he built three other rooms L-shaped onto that room. Three rooms across the front -- a long porch in front of that and 4 steps to the back of the middle room that touched down to the garden beside the cellar house door.

Later, Mom's Uncle built another room at the bottom of those stairs, on ground level, so it seemed we had a two story house. This room was the kitchen, my most cherished room. A big wood cookstove, a white enamel table, a four-bin cabinent, painted with strawberries, a table and chairs by two windows which looked out to the wee garden and the mountains that echoed behind each other as far as you could see up South Fork of the Cherry River.

This is the house we younger kids see when you say the word, "home". By the time we moved in, there was only Libby, Johnny and me left at home. We were soon-to-be seven, soon-to-be twelve, and turning fourteen in a month. We moved there in September, just before school started. A cold day -- and the house had been empty a long time and the woodstove wanted to smoke rather than burn. (I think the ghosts tried to discourage us -- they never did really take to us.)

It wasn't only the houses that had stories. The whole hill had stories. Ghost stories and stories of things that happened long ago. I know where the white horse comes out to follow people on certain nights. I know where the baby's cry startles someone walking alone. And now that the house we lived in is gone, I wonder about the unseen folks who lived there (unsociable though they might have been).

I used to be as unsociable as those ghosts. I'd walk down the hill to town, hoping no one was looking out their windows to watch me go by -- though of course they were. Eventually, I found paths in the woods, so I could slip past each house, unseen. In town, in those days at least, people didn't stare.

The pretty white house next to Grandma's that we'd first lived has grown tired and old and the people who bought it changed it a lot. I loved to play with the girls of that family because they were very imaginative. The second oldest loved animals and westerns. We'd play all day if we were let be. Her Dad wanted her to play with dolls instead and be called Elizabeth instead of Betsy.

That house was where my Uncle and his first wife lived long before we lived there. His first wife died in childbirth. Sometimes Mom would see her ghost. One night, someone walked through the living room into the back bedroom as our young cousin, Edith, used to do to spend the night. Everyone was in bed, but Mom saw the form go past her door, thought it was Edith and went in to get her some extra blankets. There was no one there.

Once we moved out of the city limits, our ideas shifted. The dirt road had grass in the middle and the place was wilder. The woods were quiet, the stream deep. I drifted into being the true wildchild, hating to go to civilization at all, except to go down town where anything might happen.

The house was not insulated, had no running water, had electricity as an afterthought, with wires running across the ceiling and a cord hanging down from the center with a bare light bulb that you turned on with a chain pull. We heated with wood and coal, we cooked with wood and coal and we carried our water from a sweet-water spring once Dad (for reasons that were beyond our reckoning,) filled in the well and tore down the well house.

I love my own ghosts of the place.

A few years ago, I took a remedy from the flower essences to unravel me from being so entangled with the past. I took Honeysuckle. It worked and I was no longer homesick. My returning now is not the same as it was before. I'm not disappointed or pining for what was. I can call it to mind for magic - to connect -- and do so without being heartsick to go home again.

But even so, I do love me a place with story.