I. One last photograph
A small black-and-white snapshot of my mother, taken sometime in the mid-1950s. In the photo—its scalloped edges worn thin and curling—she stands half-turned toward the camera in a pale swimsuit, wet hair in pigtails and bare toes digging in the sand. In the background, her out-of-focus little brother stomps either into or out of the breaking waves. My mother—who at most is ten years old in this picture, though likely closer to seven—is looking at the camera and wearing the same half-mischievous, half-dangerous grin I can recall punctuating certain rarefied moments throughout my life. It’s a winning smile. As in, she’s got you charmed. As in, she’s got you beat.
I’d be remiss if I did not also mention that drooping from her right hand with a professional sort of nonchalance is a small black gun.
Now of course, the pistol has to be a toy. But that does not change at all what I recognize in this picture of my mother. She’s made up her mind to squish some kind of bug. Her feelings won’t get hurt whatsoever in the squishing.
As much as I love this picture of my mother as a young girl, I am also acutely aware that it is indicative—or maybe the primary evidence of—a real challenge Mum presented to everyone who knew her. There was a certain malice in her need to win in any given situation, irrespective of the stakes or their magnitude. During the prolonged and ugly suit for parental custody, Mum included in her testimony jabs at my father’s penis-size and sexual behavior, details she knew were inadmissible and could possibly land her in contempt of court yet nevertheless felt compelled to air: they allowed her to cut my father down in a public theater. In a sense, her need to wound my father’s dignity on the record superseded any maternal instinct (these antics, after all, couldn’t possibly win her any points in the judge’s purview). Compare that to her nuking any argument with me—any time I contradicted her, any time I refused to bend to her will—by insisting through gnashed teeth, You are just like your father. A man who attempted to strangle Mum with a telephone wire while I watched. A man who tried to push my sister down the cellar stairs. You are just like your father. When it came to getting what she wanted, the rate or depth of casualty simply did not matter.
So, if the toy pistol in the photo had been real, would she have hesitated in shooting her little brother, the most obvious annoying bug begging for a squishing? Maybe. But if she had shot him, I’m sure she’d have treated it like a joke, blown the whole thing off. I only shot him a little bit, jeez. In that respect, she really was more interested in wounding than killing.
But this is all speculation.
As far as I know, Mum never put a bullet in her brother.
Though, of course, you don’t need a gun to draw blood. If in an argument and presented with an incontrovertible fact, something that shattered the logic of her position, Mum oftentimes would respond simply by blowing a raspberry in your face. Without a doubt, it’s a childish response. But when employed enough times over the course of a lifetime of confrontation, the meaning of the gesture begins to take on more cutting nuance, becomes a more distinct kind of dismissal, announcing without words that all your ideas and all your beliefs—the foundations upon which your ethos and identity rest—amount to little more than a wet farting sound blown through puckered lips. I really can’t think of a more effective way of expressing to someone how unimportant their puny thoughts might be.
Okay. That’s a lot of negativity wrapped up in a photograph of a little girl playing at the beach. Well-founded negativity, sure, but still: a lot. So why do I love this photograph? Why is it, in fact, the only picture of my mother I keep on display in my home, tucked into the frame of my bedroom mirror? Well. Because it’s the face of my mother, the version of her I want to remember most, to remember best. Because that dangerously playful smile was beautiful. Because it’s a picture of Mum actually happy (even if that happiness is woven with a meanness). Because even though I love seeing that look of genuine joy in my mother’s face and try to keep it most present and vivid in my mind, it’s not an expression I got to see a whole lot when Mum was still alive.
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Mum’s death was both sudden and prolonged and needlessly stupid and was maybe the result of nearly half a century of untreated depression or an equally long two-pack-a-day habit. It was maybe also the result of being married to an asshole who didn’t care about her wishes. (Who can say!)
Late in September 2008, while doing her morning aerobics, Mum suffered in near tandem a burst aneurysm in her occipital lobe and a catastrophic stroke. (How do we know she was doing morning aerobics? Because she was found still clutching her five-pound weights, sprawled face down on the floor in front of the TV.) She lost control over her body. She fell and smacked her forehead on the brick skirt surrounding the woodstove. So, count that as the third head trauma she all at once had to make sense of that dog-day morning.
Too often, I wonder what Mum saw in the moment when her brain turned against her. What did she hear? What did she feel? This singularly unique moment in her life. What was it like when the lights flared out?
In many ways, this was the moment of her death. I want this to be the moment of her death. In the quiet solitude of the farm she loved. Perhaps comforted by her menagerie of cats. By the scent of garden soil dusted between the pine floorboards. By the north wind wracking through the eaves. I want this to be the moment of her death. But when her husband arrived home from work eight hours later, she was still gasping panicked, labored breaths, so he called an ambulance and had her rushed first to Houlton Regional Hospital, then to Maine Medical Center in Portland, where the hospital—without consulting or informing a single member of our family—had her medevaced to Tufts Medical in Boston, whereupon after three weeks in a coma with tubes snaking into her arms and her brainpan and her urethra and her trachea, she was finally allowed to die. Weeks away from her sixty-first birthday. Four hundred miles from home in a city she absolutely loathed.
Mum had been a hospice nurse for twenty years. She was acutely aware of the ever-presence of death. She might have been a little romantic in her notions, but she didn’t bullshit herself or anyone around her when it came to her own eventual dying. She told us—her husband, my brother, my sister, myself—that she wanted to die a natural death. No machines. No invasive surgeries. She told us all: she wanted to die at home. She told us this at every available opportunity.
One of the last times I saw Mum alive (I do not count her three-week ICU stasis as life), she repeated her wishes again. I want to just lie down like a fox in tall grass and die. For real. That’s what I mean about romantic. Like a fox in tall grass. I told her I respected her wishes and agreed, it’s an ideal way to go. I told her I would do everything in my power to make sure she got the right kind of end. I told her that without power of attorney, there were limits to what I could do. I could suggest. I could persist. Beyond that, my hands were tied. She said she knew that. She agreed: I was probably the only one in the family who wouldn’t hesitate in helping her die. She said she’d consider making me her proxy.
Six months later:
A sterile ward in a faraway city.
A shunt draining the fluid collecting around her brain.
A machine doing all the breathing for her lungs that refused to breathe.
And in every single CT scan, a big blacked-out dead zone of inactivity where her brain had begun to necrotize.
I want to just lie down like a fox in tall grass.
I respected her wishes. I did everything within my means. I suggested. I persisted. Yet always furious, her husband was unhearing to everything but the sound of my voice: a hateful refrain against which he could lash out. (Sometimes it seemed he only kept her alive because I insisted we let her die.) Without power of attorney, there was nothing else I could do. By the end of October, the doctors finally conceded: there was no likelihood of recovery for Mum. Her husband could no longer deny the reality of our new world. We arranged for the devices to be removed from her head and arms and lungs, arranged for the morphine in incremental doses. So many weeks in waiting: it only took a few hours to be done.
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II. Slight Return
There is never a dream, after all these years, where I am not aware that Mum has died. And I dream of her all the time. It doesn’t even feel weird anymore, hanging out with Mum a couple times a week. I see my mother more now than I did when she was alive. I feel like we’re finally getting better at this mother-son thing.
I cannot recall when I finally gave up reminding her that she’s dead: for a while it seemed really important that she remember. Like maybe she’d forgotten she was supposed to be somewhere else. Like maybe she didn’t belong anymore among the living. Sometimes I’d let her down easy, take her aside and break the news in a hush, and she’d get sad and hang her head, barely whisper, I know.
Other times, exasperated, I’d holler to her the news. To which she’d blow a raspberry in my face.
What more efficient way to tell me?
It doesn’t matter if I’m dead.
Your puny thoughts don’t matter.
▴ ▴ ▴
Never do I tell her: lie down like a fox in tall grass.
Never do I ask her for the power to let her die.
Sometimes in my dreams, Mum dies again. Seizes in another stroke. Constrained blood vessels once more bursting in her brain. But even in those dreams, she’s still around. Doofing in the kitchen in her blown-out underpants. Cross-legged on the couch with a crossword in her lap. While I mourn her loss a second time around. While I try to make sense of this hollow in my heart. She spreads jam on some toast. She feeds catnip to a cat. A double ghost domestically haunting the house she loved so much.
In last night’s dream, for the first time ever, she died again and stayed dead.
Obviously, I know these dreams are just dreams. My subconscious on its own, working through its knots (or as my friend Michael once put it: your brain did a thing). Now and then I play with the notion that it really is Mum’s ghost I’m interacting with, that this is how she’s chosen to spend her afterlife. Making herself at home in the cobwebs of my memory. Reminding me that death doesn’t matter. But believing that would require believing in a whole bunch of other stuff (e.g.: an afterlife). So, logic wins out. My brain is just doing a thing.
The motivation behind what my brain is doing while I sleep seems pretty obvious too. Sometimes I want to hold onto Mum and everything I’ve lost since she died. Other times I wish I could be shut of her, let her die and stay dead. My argument with her is never not an argument with myself.
Because there is an inevitability in being someone’s child, how so much of your identity is bound up in that of your parents’. Just as how there’s an inevitability in being someone’s parent, seeing yourself reflected again and again in your child. You don’t get to choose what of yourself gets echoed, what’s irrevocably tangled together. You can’t help that it’s there. Your feelings on the matter won’t make it go away.
Mum’s stubbornness is something I still find myself struggling to forgive. (Too often, I find myself silently reliving our arguments, dredging up bilious ephemera to file as new evidence against her.) Her inability to forgive is hard for me to forgive. I’m aware of that irony. But awareness changes nothing. I want to release myself and her memory of this mulish psychic wound. I tell myself: let it go. And maybe for a few hours, I do. Maybe even a whole day. Then I go to sleep and dream of the farm. Mum with her crosswords or Mum with her cats. Arguing or not arguing. Speaking or not speaking. Toast in the kitchen. Pole beans in the garden. From an open door watching the wind have its way with the tall meadow grass beyond.
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III. Our House on the Hill
Its board-and-batten siding weathered gray from unquantifiable blizzards, thunderstorms, summer hail, and autumn sleet.
Its fieldstone foundation.
Its three separate chimneys, indicating at a glance how bitterly cold our hilltop could become.
The house’s front door—oddly elaborate, scrolled and stained hardwood with a brass knob and an enormous glass oval dominating its center—facing east toward the parallel lines of our dirt road and the inconceivably proximate border, just a single line of wire strung between lank metal stakes mostly hidden among the brambles with the ranks of spruce beyond waving greetings from the New Brunswick fringe.
Through the front door, a set of foot-worn stairs led from the entryway to the bedrooms upstairs. (The bottom step was, in fact, a trapdoor, concealing a secret compartment where Mum kept her photographs.) To the right—the north—was a room that, for most of my life, was the living room but in later years became my mother’s bedroom. To the left was the combined kitchen/dining area: exposed post and beam oiled a deep red, the floor’s unfinished plywood painted chocolate brown, the wallpaper pale yellow (or anyway, yellowed) flowers and teapots in ascending miniature ranks. Two sets of south-facing bay windows, one on either side of the woodstove. And on every free surface, houseplants rising and overflowing from pots. Angel-wing begonias. Hindu rope plants and pit-of-snakes. All the cabinetry Mum’s first husband built from wood gleaned from a collapsed outbuilding: on the inside panel of one cabinet door ran a penciled diary from earlier in the century, single-line dated entries concerned mostly with the comings and goings of a perennially loose cow.
What else about the kitchen? There were two wooden barrels, maybe five gallons each, containing flour or rice or, for a period of five or six years, all my plastic Smurf figurines. There was a door painted black that led to the cellar stairs. There was a vertical line of three enormous Artist’s Conk mushrooms, shellacked and mounted on the western wall, and always to the right of those mushrooms hung a framed print on loan from the town library—for the longest time a years-overdue reproduction of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World—to cover a hole my father shot through the wall.
Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World is another good point of reference. The house and land in that painting look an awful lot like how our house existed up until the late 1980s.
It is also worth noting how often my mother would tell me:
The woman in that picture is crippled.
The woman in that picture is me.
All the time. From the moment my parents separated until the suit for custody ended. All the time, Mum would point at Christina lying stranded in the grass, the distant farmhouse both something to crawl toward and crawl from, a refuge and a threat.
The woman in that picture is crippled.
She had to count and roll all her change to pay the painting’s overdue fine.
The woman in that picture is me.
My father had once tried to shoot a weasel running loose throughout the house. That’s why there was a hole in the wall: he missed.
The four bedrooms upstairs were small and rarely occupied by any one of us for more than a couple years. (For whatever reason, we each of us enjoyed or at least got used to an occasional rearranging of space.) The southern bedrooms looked out over the driveway and garden, then a long meadow of tall grass and wildflowers edged by our nearest, best line of apple trees, then our seventy acres of evergreen woodlot, and beyond that—as the topography declined continually toward the coast almost one hundred miles away—the hazy suggestions of the nearest Grand Lakes. The northern bedroom windows looked out over a two-acre field (sometimes potatoes, sometimes wheat, sometimes fallow with clover, and most years tended by a farmer down the road), then our nearest neighbor’s dilapidated shanty, and faintly past that, the red brick of the retired customhouse half a mile away, then little more than uninterrupted sky.
These are the things that are certain. Everything else about the house was in flux. When I was very young, there was an ell and porch off the back of the kitchen—a rugged space dominated by enormous skeletal barn spiders and their gauzy graveyard webs—then a tall barn with a hayloft above the threshing floor. As far as I know, these were part of the original farm built sometime around 1860. But eventually, these structures were torn down and replaced with newer additions: a bigger living room extending off the kitchen and an attached, open greenhouse. Meanwhile, our long front yard was replaced by a shoddy attempt at a two-car garage and a makeshift breezeway whose fly-specked bay window was always fogged from a bad seal. No more view of Canada through our ornate glass door. No more sightline of black spruce trees waving hello in the wind.
West of the house lay an additional seventy acres of field and forest, wild spreads of blackberry and raspberry, untended orchards emerging from odd thickets and completely wild apples, thorny and gnarled, yielding bitter or sweet or no fruit at all, a plethora of vegetation that, as a kid, I only thought of as bushes, as trees, but as an adult working in the horticulture industry I would learn to know by name: cornus sericea, viburnum trilobum, picea glauca, populus tremuloides. Piles of rocks, culled from the fields by generations of farmers, where my brother and I would build stone forts, low walls and shaky battlements. Scattered remnants of rusted farm equipment like ancient relics of a forgotten world. An anthill the size of a Galapagos tortoise. A cow pond deep among the brambles. A bog of black muck where, every spring, we’d harvest fiddleheads by the bushel.
Growing up, this is the world to which I would retreat, to walk alone, to try making sense of my head and my heart, to smoke filched cigarettes and unruly amounts of pot. I composed my first poems and stories out among the grass and trees. I fantasized, and I escaped. In the winter, I followed rabbit tracks in the snow. This was the place I considered most my home. Among the ghosts of this land’s previous inheritors. In the acute absence of anyone else.
▴ ▴ ▴
IV. Losses & Gains
All my brother’s hair fell out after our mother died. It didn’t happen all at once. But it didn’t take too long either. Count that among the most obvious, outward changes that my siblings and I underwent. We all drank substantially more. Jaison and I smoked ten million cigarettes. Jaison and Tanya smoked acres of pot. (The night that Mum was finally allowed to die, the three of us sat parked on the roof of the Tuft’s garage, Jai and Tanya getting high up front while, in the back, I downed a pint of Dewar’s White, we as a unified team setting the tone and methodology of grief we’d pursue for the months to come.) Tanya gained weight while Jai and I lost it. Jai’s girlfriend threatened to leave him. Mine had already left. For entire weeks that following winter, I would stay inside, only leaving the house for smokes and beer while watching movies on endless loops. Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. With only slight variations in our attack and means, Jaison and Tanya and I were withdrawing from the world. All our relationships suffered.
All except our relationship to one another. In that first year after Mum died, the three of us drew closer together than we’d ever been before. The way I remember it feeling was like we were an animal litter left on its own to fend for itself. Which I guess is what we were. Orphans. Back to protecting back, with a wary eye turned on everything that wasn’t us. It seemed, for entire weeks, Jaison and Tanya were the only people I talked to. Sometimes cooing one another asleep over the phone at 3 a.m. Sometimes just explaining how the most simple, pedestrian details of our lives seemed so alien and surreal now, insurmountable. We were protecting each other as best we could. We might have been wounded and shell-shocked and increasingly self-medicated, but we could at least seek some kind of solace in one another. We were going to survive this together. We held on to what little we had left.
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In terms of the material, there was very little left to hold on to. Mum didn’t have a will. Or if she did, it was homemade and too well hidden. Or maybe found and strategically destroyed. Regardless. After her estate went through probate, Mum’s widower essentially bought out my siblings’ and my shares of the farm: we each got a few thousand dollars and little else. Tanya got Mum’s jewelry. Jaison got Mum’s record collection. I got a coffee cup. This was the sum of our inheritance. The physical evidence that our mother was ever real. Almost immediately following the estate’s execution, Mum’s widower remarried, then shortly thereafter died too. Thus, in a swift passage of months, our home—our mother’s home—transferred in title and deed into the hands of her final husband’s children and stepchildren and bride, into whatever unknowable motivations and intentions they might harbor. The farm and everything attached to it was gone.
It’s hard not to feel angry about this. For Mum, the farm had never been just a piece of land. It was a concept. A parachute in case any of us fell. No matter how dire our lives proved to be, Jaison and Tanya and I would always have one safe place in the world. An outpost on the border designed for retreat. An isolated farm on a dead-end road.
Mum spent forty years—almost her entire adult life—safeguarding this sanctuary for us. But she didn’t complete the one protection that mattered. No notarized testament filed with the clerk’s office. No legal document stating her will. Which meant her ideas and efforts meant nothing. No sanctuary. No refuge. Just a disputed property to be divided between three children and an increasingly destabilized widower. Her heir apparent with power of attorney. We lost everything because Mum married an asshole.
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But what exactly does lost in this context even mean? Is it to have an allotment of your life and world erased from the atlas of your identity? Or does it simply mean that what was yours is now another’s? Or simpler yet, what was yours is now not yours. Nothing is gone. Nothing is erased.
You just can’t call it your home anymore.
In April 2015, I accepted an invitation to give a reading at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics, the residential magnet school where I completed my last two years of high school. October 2009 was the last time I’d driven north into Aroostook County—that big, northern panhandled chunk of Maine that, until 1842, was part of colonial New Brunswick—when Jaison and I went to gather the few personal effects of Mum’s we were allowed. Since we weren’t permitted back on the farm (Mum’s widower insisting he’d shoot us if we ever again stepped foot on his property, a threat I had no reason to doubt and, for all I know, would have been honored by his next of kin), I’d convinced myself over the six intervening years that I did not miss this remote stretch of America’s end. (After all, why pine after what you can never have back?) The invitation all at once had me doubting that conviction.
My partner, Genevieve, wanted to join me on this trip, wanted to see where I was raised and witness with her own eyes this strange place few people have ever been, to see the locations that, in my stories’ retellings, had taken on legendary proportions. The hoarder at the top of Drake’s Hill who’d turned his entire property into a cramped junk-sculpture park. The famous dairy bar whose ice cream I’ve witnessed convert devout vegans. The dust-swept potato fields. The shoulder-rolling terrain. And I wanted to show her. I was eager to. Which meant maybe I’d missed the place after all.
The day before we left, I called the town manager’s office. I had heard various rumors as to how the farm had changed hands more than once over the past few years, but I had no idea who owned the place now. I wanted Genevieve to see the house, the land, the western horizon etched indelibly in my memory. I wanted to see it for myself. But I had to make sure it was safe. I had to know who owned the farm.
“The old customhouse?” the woman on the other end of the line asked.
At that, I had to laugh. It’d been at least forty years since the brick house down the road from our farm had been used for any kind of official border activity. Yet still: “the old customhouse.” It was reassuring to know how long the memory of the landscape persists.
“Two houses further down the way,” I told her. “The last house on Lincoln Road.”
“Okay. Hold on one second.” I could hear her open a cabinet drawer—that unmistakable rumble and squeak—could hear fingers moving among the records. I was amazed at how easy this process was proving to be: ask a question, get an answer.
“Yep. It’s the Amish.”
“The Amish?”
“Mm-hmm. They been buying up lots of farms out that way.”
“Oh.”
The Amish.
I imagined black hats with buckles on the bands. I pictured beards without mustaches.
The woman on the phone asked if I needed anything else. I remember, she called me dear. I told her no, thank you, that just about does it. She wished me a good day. We hung up.
I had called the town office to learn if the farm was safe.
The Amish sounded pretty safe.
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V. Anyone Can Have a Good Time
When we were kids, Jai and I both often dreamed about the farm. The long rolling hills painted in the near-black of evergreens, the bone-white of poplars, and the tawny blond fields. The far-off ghosts of the Appalachians bluely haunting the horizon. In our dreams, the farm was always the site of a battle or some other impending disaster inexorably closing in. An army of undead. A virus or pestilential worm. A tidal wave crushing impossibly up the hills. Mum, I remember, would have these dreams too. Always in the dreams, we were on the losing side of the war.
When I dream of the farm now, things are quiet. There are cats and rabbits in the grass outside. Jaison naps on a living-room couch. Mum is dead or has just died again and is making a pie in the kitchen. This is what passes for normal these days. The crisis we waited all our lives for has come and gone. We lost. In its aftermath, finally, we can relax.
▴ ▴ ▴
There was still snow on the ground in Aroostook County that April. But the air was warm when the breeze was still. What of the Earth we could see just seemed an excuse to justify the stunning vault of sky.
Genevieve and I stayed at a motel. We swam in the pool and had drinks in the lounge. We ate dinner at a place called Burger Boy. Wherever we went, people always wanted to talk to us. In the morning, we drove over to my old school. I met some of the students. I met with old friends who were now teachers and administrators. I gave a reading and signed some books. I had an overwhelmingly positive time.
Then Genevieve and I drove south to my hometown.
We stood in the market square and watched the Meduxnekeag River drift slowly behind the buildings.
We walked around the library where I had once spent entire summer days.
We got an ice cream at the famous dairy bar.
We did a slow drive-by of the hoarder’s palisade of handmade lawn art.
We started toward the farm.
Fields snow-swept and deep brown with wet. Fields shaggy with dried winter rye. Silos and spotted cows. Farmhouses wherein I might still know people’s names.
“This,” I said as I turned the car onto Lincoln Road, “is starting to feel like something.”
Beside me, Genevieve took my hand. She stroked my hair and massaged the muscle between my forefinger and thumb. Slowly, I let out a long breath, my head light and swimmy. I may or may not have eaten a Klonopin at the dairy bar.
Throughout our trip north, a handful of CDs had been on steady rotation. A mix of underground hip-hop. Busdriver’s Beaus$Eros. Both albums by Owls. So, while it feels like an artful construction to say so, it is plausible—and in fact, I am almost certain—that on the stereo, Owls were playing “Anyone Can Have a Good Time.”
We lose each other.
We’ve no right not to.
Regardless. Passing the first farms of Lincoln Road, I punched the stereo off.
Changes were evident before we crested the first hill. It appeared the woman on the phone had been right: the Amish had bought up a lot of the land on Lincoln Road. A dairy farm. A potato farm. A wood lot. Fallow fields. All being worked now by ascetic Christians.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Things are happening up here.”
Gasping, Genevieve pointed at a tall black horse standing by a house in the field. The horse was new. The house was new too.
“That thing’s huge,” she said. “It’s taller than a person.”
Which was true. A man was standing alongside the horse, running a curry brush over its flank. His head barely reached its shiny black shoulder.
“I used to get high in that field,” I told her. But that was non-information. I got high in all these fields.
Rounding the bend, just past what I grew up thinking of as Leroy Crane’s farm, we approached the old brick customhouse—ascending the hill, the road now paralleling the Canadian border—and in the field behind the house, silhouetted against the sky: a man in a tall hat driving a pair of horses pulling a tiller. Great clods of dirt flew high in their wake. Like a schooner making waves, ripping through the earth.
Cruising by, we watched the flying dirt in awestruck stupefaction. It did not seem possible this was real.
We passed the brick customhouse and a field half-ribbed in snow. We passed the blackened cellar hole where our nearest neighbor’s shanty once stood. The farm came into view.
“Baby,” Genevieve breathed. “There’s a windmill.”
“Yeah. That’s Mum’s windmill.”
I guess I’d forgotten to tell her there was a windmill.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, again stroking my hair.
Like a fox in tall grass.
In a shooshing outrush of held air: “I’m feeling.”
We’ve no right not to.
We passed the last field and pulled to a stop at the rutted driveway’s end.
The sagging garage.
The clouded breezeway window.
The original farmhouse, over a hundred and fifty years old, clapboards weathered gray.
The addition and greenhouse out back where the barn and ell used to stand.
The sloping backyard crusted in old snow.
The dormant raspberry patch and line of apple trees.
The rolling shoulders of the hills.
The indelible western horizon.
We got out of the car and approached the house.
I never thought I’d be this kind of person.
We introduced ourselves to the people inside.
▴ ▴ ▴
Jake and Savilla are originally from Missouri. It was only a few years ago that they took a train and then a bus from their longtime home to join the Amish community in Smyrna, Maine. When the community opted to start a satellite colony and bought up the lion’s share of Lincoln Road, Jake and Savilla moved into Mum’s farm.
“We’ve only been here since January,” Savilla tells us. “We’re still getting to know the place.”
A neatly tied bonnet.
A beard without a mustache.
Jake and Savilla are in their sixties. They quite happily invite Genevieve and me inside the house. Their home. They invite us inside their home. We sit at their kitchen table and eat molasses cookies, drink sweet apple cider preserved in a mason jar. It’s warm with the woodstove’s roar. Add a cloud of cigarette smoke and this could be a perfect reenactment of a scene from thirty years ago.
Outside, Jake and Savilla’s corgi sniffs around in the crusty snow. In the garage, their little dark horse snorts and stamps its hay.
Honestly, I’m not sure what I was expecting would happen, visiting this place again. Maybe we’d just look at the house from outside. Confirm that it still exists or maybe no longer exists. I don’t think I expected to be welcomed inside, to sit talking for two hours in my former kitchen. I don’t think I expected to answer so many questions.
“Why is the floor in one half of the root cellar a full foot higher than the other half?”
“Why does the greenhouse have so little glass?”
“What is this thing in the bathroom?”
For my part, I answer as best I can.
“I guess they got tired of digging that part.”
“I don’t think Mum knew how a greenhouse was supposed to be.”
“That’s a whirlpool.”
“A whirlpool?” Savilla asks.
“It’s like a fancy bathtub.”
Jake nods. “I use it to fill the bucket when I water the horse.”
“Yeah, and track mud through the house when you do it too.”
“I can show you where there’s an outside spigot.”
They consider this a good turn of fortune. They had not known there was a spigot outside. This place that still feels so familiar to me, so present in my memory, is a mystery to these new inheritors.
Jake wants to know about the line of apple trees out back. Savilla wants to know what other plantings are about. I can tell Genevieve’s curious about these things as well. Eventually, we all go outside.
“Now what is this thing supposed to be?” Savilla asks me. She’s bent to pick up some Styrofoam thing off the ground by the back deck.
“That’s just some trash,” I say. The last residents left trash everywhere. Filthy throw rugs and plastic nothings half-buried in the snow. “Just some trash someone left behind.”
Jake and Savilla seem less affected by this news than I am: why would someone choose to strew garbage over their own lawn? Why with intention make shitty something so nice?
Above the hills, the western sky is turning pink. Spruce and fir near-black against the snow. Bone-white poplars. Tawny dead-grass fields. The windmill’s frozen blades. I show Jake and Savilla and Genevieve where the chives and catnip and borage will soon sprout from the thawing ground. The rose bush and lilac and magnolia I planted for Mum in the summer of 2006. The unstrung clothesline, just two wooden crosses set several yards apart. The tire swing, still snowbound, descending from the crown of the front yard’s sugar maple. The landmarks that once defined my home.
While I talk to Jake and Savilla, Genevieve crouches to ruffle the corgi’s orange fur. A cool wind blows in from the north. That ruffles the dog’s fur too.
“You’re telling me that’s a magnolia?” Jake says. We’re standing at the rock retaining wall my brother and I helped build—a long tapered gore of slate terracing the driveway above the sloping backyard—looking south toward the winter-nude tree. “This far north?”
“Yep. It’s the hardiest variety, as far as I know. A Dr. Merrill magnolia. Magnolia x loebneri.” The tips of its branches each uprise in a fuzzy gray bud. Like a pussy willow or a rabbit’s foot. “It’s looking good. It should bloom like crazy for you guys soon.”
It will take a few weeks to process this moment before I understand what I’m feeling. But it’s relief. I’m feeling the giddy sweetness of relief. Relief to have this last surprise chance to see my former home. Relief to discover these people now watching over the farm. This place is no longer mine. But it’s safe. In this moment, that’s what matters most. This home is finally safe. Mum had wanted so much for this place to be a refuge removed from the rest of the world. A piece of fertile earth to be worked. A life sustained by the land. She could never quite make that happen for herself. But these people can.
“Where would be a good place to plant a garden?” Jake asks me, and with the southern fields unfolding below us toward the far-off pines, I cannot help but smile. I’d planted the magnolia at the northwest corner of Mum’s vegetable garden. I didn’t want it to out-shade the tender things she grew.
“Right here,” is what I tell him. “You’re looking at it.”
—Scarborough, Maine
2016
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