By Richard Odell
There comes a certain hour in September. The long march of Spring and Summer stands still. The alder leaves are now a time-hardened raiment of darkened green with flecks of brindle and gold. The broken fields are spent, whitened, at rest in the tilted sunlight. One looks upon it all and feels rich in days. And the very fullness of the hour, itself, informs you that it will not last.
Then comes the first evening too dark to take after-work coffee on the deck. Then the first cold rains. Then comes the day like today, the first of those blue-sky, October days we like to call “crisp.”
My day is open and blank, like the sky. And unexpectedly so. No work, no weekly duties press upon me, no appointments. I wasn’t prepared for this. I can’t be sitting all day looking out my window, wondering how long I have to wait to take a nap. It comes to me: this day I can do what I’ve meant to do, and haven’t done, for years now – visit a certain house no longer there.
It stood once, alone, uncrowded, across a wide field, some hundred yards in from the main highway, north of the village and south of an elementary school itself no longer there. (Some years back, tasked with driving some off-Islanders from deep in Maury Island to the north-end ferry, I thought it appropriate to give them something in the form of tour guidance along the way. By the time we’d cleared the village, I realized most of what I’d pointed out to them were things no longer there.)
It was the first house I entered in life, in my mother’s arms (I like to think), born Cesarean section some days before. I’ve no memory of it. By the time I was five months old, we were out and gone down the road to the Heights. Don’t know why we moved. My parents were renters, and maybe the place went up for sale. Maybe it wasn’t so great a house.
In looking back, my parents would call it “The Lean Place,” or such it was spelled in my mind. I assumed not because it leaned, or because we were lower middle-class, back then, but after the name of the owner and likely previous resident. In my parents’ day, houses were often known and named, around the neighborhood, in memory of past residents.
The Lean Place stood another 50 years after my family’s departure, becoming for me, in time, an unvisited roadside attraction; never overlooked, yet never “taken in,” until it was too late and it was gone. In the family archives, which I’m left with as the sole survivor, the only record of it is a single black and white photograph of my father in his sizeable, side-yard garden, hoisting my three-year old brother above the potatoes and corn.
A tennis court, strangely unassociated with any residence, replaced the Lean Place after it was finally razed. Never saw anyone engaged thereon. Decorative trees, planted long after our time there, framed, and eventually eclipsed, the court. Still, the thought, with all my passings-by, of “Why not just go there,” edged its way ever forward in mind, yet always while I was on my way somewhere. Seriously, I never expected, coming up through life, that my seventies would be spent so much on the clock.
This day there is no somewhere else. Even so, it is afternoon by the time I’m bundled up and on my way. Shadows are already cast along the east side of the highway, and on that curiosity of a sidewalk, a relic of the Great Depression and the WPA, that runs between the village and the old school grounds. I find a parking place along the shoulder where the sunlight still rests, that my car might be kept warm (the never-ending strategies of the aged!), leaving for myself a healthy, little walk uphill to my goal.
Near where a few steps and a mailbox may once have been is a busted box housing a water meter with nothing left to measure. The broad field beyond has been well kept, the autumn grass thick and mown (by whom?). I venture across, open to view, a lone moonwalker with the whole world watching, awkwardly aware that, in a lifetime of drive-bys I have never, ever, EVER seen anyone upon this field. I have of course rehearsed my excuse should a neighbor come forth and ask me, “What the hell?” Forgive an old man who only wanted to see where his native home had been.
The little thicket of decorative trees has grown too dense to penetrate, so I flank the southern end, where a tall, red oak (how old, I wonder) dominates. And, well, there it is. A tennis court. Not much one can say about that. Not the sort of scene one feels compelled to “drink in.” True, it is solid and clean, adorned with a few fall leaves, and a dead, gray tree branch from seasons past conveying a sense of abandonment. The net is yet whole and taut, though grey lichens have begun to gather here and there along the lines.
I stand where my father’s garden had been, where the land slopes to the south, the mown grass beneath me a thick, blonde blanket over the past. In the distance, one can still see Mount Rainier through a light thicket of willows which could surely not have been there long. What a view there must have been! One can even see a patch of Puget Sound, blue as the sky, far below to the east. Strange it seems, no one has thought to replace, on this choice plot, the house that once had been. All has been left in peace.
Well, there’s that, and it’s palpable. Peace to take home, for the sojourn, here. The main highway traffic, far removed, sounds like a mountain river out of sight. From behind a high hedge, on the neighboring grounds, comes the sound of children playing, like delicate purse strings, tying the whole of time together.
I snap a twig from the red oak, as a keepsake, and make my way back across the field. And now I am cured of it all.
