Grief, Expect the Unexpected!

Grief is a strange thing. It hits you without warning, even when your expecting it.  Recently, my folks sold the home I grew up in....and while I had left the house of my own volition, it was fairly traumatic thing for me since I was not able to return to the home and send it off in person. So as per usual I wrote,  this time I wrote to my siblings and included a note I have just sent to the new owners. A cathartic send off if you will.  My hope is you might enjoy it, and feel a bit of nostalgia from your own childhood home. Like watching a Christmas Story, wasn't your family, but you can relate.

Siblings,

When mom said a few years ago she was selling the house, I heard her, but didn't believe it would pass.  When last summer I drove out of the driveway, I had said goodbye to the house, but didn't think it would be the last time I would make the harrowing 100 yard dash against traffic onto Pensyl Creek road.  I loved that house and wouldn't have chosen to grow up anywhere else.  I have a strong case of wanderlust, I like the adventure of packing up and moving out, strangely having that base, literally Home Base, always made it easy to move on.  You can always go home so it is easy to go forth.  That house is gone now.  I understand why, I get it was necessary, Im happy to see Mom and Dad move someplace flat, someplace better for them, but my heart is heavy today as I mourn the loss.  That stream was mine, and while I left it, and I hope to see some new young kid own it, it will be hard to knock on the door rather than just open it, in a few years and ask to fish.
The house for me is a collection of memories, a collection we all call "growing up"  and now that we are older we can call it nostalgia.  Nostalgia hurts.  And for the first time, in a very very long time, I feel that I have lost out on something by moving away from Stroudsburg.  The loss is strange, its not about having something once and wanting it back, its about the realization that you can't always return, you can't always go home and you definitely can't go back in time.  We don't get to relive life, a moments experience is spent the minute it enters the memory books. That's not to say I regret living there, but to say I want more moments like those.
I wish I could be there to help with the move, to say goodbye again, one last piss over the wall, and to say thank you to the ground and the home that molded me, and contained our family.  I'm sorry I cant be there.
Rather than turn to a bottle of strong spirits, to avoid the viscous perplexities mom continues to believe lurk in my soul, I like to write. It helps at once calm the mind, while capturing my thoughts for the future before they are lost.  Sometimes writing helps me to know why I'm feeling the way that I am and sometimes it makes things harder to face.  This time around, the writing made my heart ache, and I hope that is the first step in the healing process.
I have now said good bye to the house officially, in the best way I can for the moment.  Someday I may return to it,not steal back in the dead of night, but knock on the door in the middle of the day, "Hi, I grew up here" what else is there to say?  Meanwhile I wrote the text below, which I will send someday soon to the new homeowners, as much for their amusement as for my catharsis. 

The letter to the new owners:

Dear folks,

I would like to welcome into the home I grew up in.  We have not met and are likely never to cross paths, but I feel we are connected by some degree since you purchased the home on Foundry Street.  I have fond memories of that place and it was a great neighborhood to grow up in.  I hope it treats you well and allows your family to flourish.

I left the house 23 years ago for college and I never really returned. Holidays and summer break brought me home for small windows of time.  Those time windows allow you to see the place change like flipping through snapshots. The home has aged well, the stream lives where it always has and the gardens flourish under mothers care and dads back. My folks owned the home for 40 years and cared for it, as it cared for us.  Things have changed though.  I would like to offer you a few of those snapshots.

When I was a kid the roof was slate and there were more trees on the property. There used to be a string of hemlocks on the property line near where the large rock is in the back yard.  It paralleled the stream. Those trees died one by one due whatever disease is wiping out the rest of the hemlocks in PA.  It was sad to see them go.  There was also a tall maple or two near the chimney on the side of the house.  They too died and had to be cut down. Several willow trees lived in the space between the yard and the stream down by the bridge.  These trees where several feet in diameter when they died, and were amazing to watch sway about in the storms. The large maple in the lower yard, near Foundry street had a tire swing on it for some time.

In the bottom of the yard near the magnolia is a spring.  When the water table is high you will see the grass grow faster there, deeper green.  It was never a problem except as kids we would run and slide through it, Mom never liked that since we got muddy and wrecked the grass, but it was fun.  The magnolia tree is my favorite part of the yard.  In the spring it will bloom all at once, provided you don’t get a late snow to knock off the branches. We climbed the tree, camped under it, and hid within it during night tag. We had an orange swing set under that tree for years.

The barn is fairly new.  The original was lost in either the blizzard of 93-94 or 92….the new one was built on the old foundation.  We had great times as kids in the old barn, lots of places to hide and explore.  Since the new barn was built, Dad made it a workshop and completed countless projects, “making sawdust” he would say, so as to never lead one to believe he had more skills than he did. Part of the old barn remains.  It was built as a chicken coup before my folks had the home, and over the course of my childhood housed our family pets which at some points included Dogs, Cats, Chickens, a Sheep named cookie, and rabbits.  The rabbits dug out of the clay floor once, if you look I bet the hole is still there. 

As a kid and well into adulthood we shot BB’s from near the basement exterior door, up the yard.  If you had a metal detector there would be 4 million blips on the screen in that area…..BB’s all, shot over the course of some 35 years.  My sons were taught to shoot in that yard, with the same red rider gun I learned on.  The patio also is fairly new, as a kid the area outside the cellar door was a sand box, which kept my siblings and I content when the stream was too cold or too high to play in.

The cover of the septic tank was broken by my neighbors head maybe 30 years ago…..the corner cracked off as he ran at night, stumbled and impacted during a game of night tag.  Somehow he made it through with just a mild concussion.

The yard is a sea of landmarks, the Big Rock, the Big stairs, Down the Bank.  These are the places my sisters and I named as kids.  Places for adventure.  You will find the area between the yard and the stream (down the bank) full of the remnants of my childhood.  We used to build forts there out of sticks and rocks.  The trails are still there I believe, between what was a large dam and the bridge.  If you were to go down the bank today and fight through the thicket and sticker/ pricker bushes you might find an old ammo box of mine that might have some form of a kids treasure in it…..I don’t remember what.  I lost several knives there and at least one axe through the years. Too many balls were also consumed by the thicket.  Every now and again one of the large walnut trees would fall across the creek and pull up its roots.  This was pounced on and became the new fort…..you might find some of those places still marked by the upturned root wads. The siblings and I mined the shale rocks that were pulled up with the tree roots, if cracked correctly small crystals could be found in the shale and maybe a fossil shell or two.

The Appenzell creek boarders the property, we called it a “crick” and spent as much time as possible there as kids.  In the summer it is shallow and you can play on the rocks jumping from on to the next.  Tip over the rocks to find critters like crawfish and minnows. We would find the soft blue shale or red shale, and the white claystone pebbles and grind them with some water on a harder rock to make a paint of sorts…..the result was hours of fun. We called it “Indian Paint” and decorated ourselves with it regularly.  As you travel upstream from the bridge you encounter a ripple we called the big waves.  The stream bed is on smooth shale and can be slippery, but it is a lot of fun to ride an inner tube on in the summer.  In that area you will also find a grape vine, you will smell the fox grapes in late august.

This stream molded my life as I spent countless hours on the banks or in its waters.  Today I’m in water resource engineering and attribute that career choice to the questions posed by the swirling waters, water I studied as a kid in my backyard.  The stream is excellent fishing and runs clean and clear, and owns many of my best fishing experiences.  You will find a swimming hole downstream, the top of the hole is just visible from the bridge, where the stream turns to the left.  Ask the Fossetts, next door, if you can run through their field or put on old sneakers and walk the stream down.  The water isn’t too deep, maybe three feet but it holds trout and is excellent fun in the summer. I hope the stream is good to you.

Thunderstorms seem to follow the stream.  They come in from the west and are captured by the shallow Appenzell valley, the thunder roars down the valley and runs into the house. When I was older, visiting home, one of my favorite places was sitting on the back screen porch watching the lightening flashes, light up the yard as the storms rolled in, and the fireflies (lightning  bugs) when the storms were gone.  Mom would join me and hand me an iced tea, I will never forget it.

The home was never large enough in my parents eyes.  The houses charms, which many have remarked on over the years, while beautiful, limited what could be done with the place.  The kitchen area was once separated from the dining area by an arched wall.  And the Cedar covered den once had a pass through connection to the kitchen. Dad tore down the wall and locked up the pass through, new cabinets were installed and the radiator was removed from the kitchen.  The room with the fireplace was always moms favorite. She would retreat there and for a time kept us from destroying the room with our toys.  It was the formal living room and has been remodeled several times.  This was our room for family Christmases, and on rare occasions a fire would be started.  As kids we danced in that room to oldies 99 with our parents.

The hardwood floors of the house have at times been covered with carpet and other times left to the savages of a family with young children.  The windows have been replaced in just the last few years.  Before that the house leaked air and you could hear the cars on the road and the stream when it was high.  Those windows also had old glass which had bubbles and waves that distorted light in places and forced rainbows on the dining room floor.

The small room upstairs was mine.  As the only boy I had the only room to myself.  I loved that place.  I believe it is the only room in the house that was not refinished with new sheetrock.  You might find horsehair plaster and lath under the layers of paint.  The teal green was my idea, and I had it up with the damage done, before mom returned from work.  She hated it.  The room is small and cozy, I could open the windows for fresh air, and watch the sun rise over my neighbors fields.  The radiator was never turned on, preferring the cold nights, cold, for better sleeping.  From that room I could predict canceled school for snow days depending on when the plow went up the road.  The earlier Pensyl creek was plowed the less chance there was for a snow day. 

I don’t want to close this letter as it’s my last chapter in the story of that house.  The ground and home made me what I am today; molded the people I love and held us together as long as it could.   I’m not a sentimental person generally, and I know that this transition is natural and for the right cause, but somehow that knowledge does not help. I thought I had said goodbye to the home last summer, but somehow doubted mom would sell it.  Denial, it seems, lurked in my soul; only to surface now, knowing the inevitable came to pass. I miss it more now than I did a moment ago, before I wrote this letter.

So, it’s with a heavy heart that I thank you for taking the time to follow me through the scrap book, allowing me to pull out the snapshots and share them with you.  I hope the house you moved into becomes the home I left behind and continues to shelter and nurture your family as it did mine.  Your experiences will fill the next chapters of the small house at the corner of Pensyl Creek and Foundry and I wish you only the best.