The house I grew up in is being auctioned
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- August 25, 2024
- 588
One of my sisters sent us a peppy video the other week that startled me. As it began, I watched with interest as the camera panned through a home that was going up for auction. And I said to myself, hold on, that’s my house.
There’s the steps I used to sit on and twirl the long telephone cord, and there is the eave under which I slept and dreamed big dreams for my future. The shape of a house may change, but its corners, the ghostly outlines that once were, remain.
It’s not really my house, but it is the house I grew up in — the one I still wake up from in dreams having traveled through, the one where my mom still stands at the big blue sink peeling potatoes, the one where Dad has just spread mulch on the gardens, thick and steaming.
Sometimes I dream of her gardens, lush and inviting, no longer of this world as they were scraped clean of greenery. I don’t begrudge anyone the work a large perennial garden holds. You have to want to care for it, tend it. Sixteen years later I still mourn those beds.
I moved to a new home where the gardens are small, minimal. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from bringing Mom’s garden with me, alive still with hydrangeas, lilies, hostas, ground covers. I brush my hands over what came from her stock, happy it exists, overjoyed it is healthy, growing.
As the growing season reaches its zenith, a multitude of tomatoes, corn and peppers making their way to our table for consumption, I think about Mom’s vegetable garden as well. It was large and bountiful when I was small. I never liked weeding it, but some days I would walk its carefully thought-out pathways, examining the beans that grew on the vine, plucking a tomato and feeling the warmth of the sun on its skin.
She would set up lawn chairs in the front yard, under the big trees the state would later cut down. Snap, snap, snap they would go into the big metal pan. We would softly chatter about the day, and the neighborhood felt close, like a beating heart.
Mom tried new-to-us veggies like kohlrabi, as well as a plethora of pickles that would later be processed and poured into jars, the acrid smell of vinegar permeating the house. Mom was a processor, canning and freezing everything she could. Purple grape season is coming up, and I long for a jar of her jelly, a thick layer spread over peanut butter — the best snack ever.
When she died and we went through her freezer, I found one jar of grape jelly. I savored it bit by bit over many months.
I didn’t get that gene, so I write about it to remember. As she aged, she didn’t need such a big garden, and it eventually turned into an English garden my kids would run through. She would buy gardening books with layouts, ideas, tangible pictures she used to plan out its shape. Wild and free, the flowers would bend their heads over the razor-sharp edges of the bed, the lawn cut by my dad to complement them. It’s why today I still keep my edges neat and the lawn lines sharp. It’s a pang of nostalgia that hits me right in the heart.
The end of August will see this space auctioned off to the highest bidder. I almost want to go, just to see who buys it. I want to shake off the pain of my parents selling at the height of the recession in 2008. I want to wonder what they’ll do and if eventually my home place will be absorbed into the sprawl of Berlin. If that happens, I may find a way around it, never driving by again. Whilst memories remain, the thought of it not being there brings me a pain I had thought I laid down.
My little pink room under the southeastern eave of the house overlooked the garden. I read hundreds of books in that room, cried, listened to myriad records and sat by the window for a cool breeze. The garden sometimes lit up at night with fireflies and moonlight, its cool pathways always beckoning me come. It’ll stay that way in my mind, no matter what comes of the place, the ghostly outlines of it ever etched in my memory banks.
Melissa Herrera is a published author and opinion columnist. She is a curator of vintage mugs and all things spooky, and her book, “TOÑO LIVES,” can be found at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives. For inquiries, to purchase her book or anything else on your mind, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com or find her in the thrift aisles.