She was beautiful, a bit small at first. There were wooden panels cutting a rabid swath from every corner. She had two rooms with the potential for more, and chance to start a future.
Then came a room, and another. The wood was covered or replaced with grainy grey shingles. The grey shingle moistened and dried so many times that they began to rot. A generation came and went, then came back spawning another.
There were ghosts, not spectral spasms or phantasmal energies, but memories. Walls changing color, furniture coming and going like the children. There was a beautifully brown couch and a rough static cushioned chair. Next to the couch was a misplaced metal shelf that housed endless trinkets, like old watches, batteries, photos, toenail clippers, loose change, a couple pockets knives, and any many other items that paralleled the houses history.
A radio once adorned the center of the house, then an old box TV, and now a fat screen piece of crap with no character spews out the modern day nonsense, shallow and cold.
The porch appeared many years after her birth. A stony or maybe metallic desk slowly filled itself with small pieces of the house’s history. There were puzzles with no box, and pieces missing so that only part of the picture could be made; a little black book of dates so far removed from the present that nothing inside was legible. Little toys and sports paraphernalia slipped and slid across the floor till they found their perfect and final resting place. Newspapers and magazine began to rise from the floor to the ceiling as if taking on a monstrous life of their own.
The cellar went from a useful hole in the ground where jars of preserves were stored to a dusty place with dirt floors and hidden boogie men lay. The back porch, which had a cracked and uneven cement surface, held an old washing machine were the young children occasionally had their tender fingers smashed. Behind the finger smasher was an ancient magic kitchen cabinet where old battle scarred action figures with crack chests, or missing limbs would reappear after vanishing years ago.
The yard, once full of the sound of children’s laughter and barking dogs, grew silent. Not even the old rope swing with the cracked wooden seat remained. The cement steps and small walkway lost their final battle to the shrubbery. Now the door is concealed as if it is some secret passageway to another land. Maybe it is.
She leans lightly to the left, buckling under her own weight as she sinks slowly into the dirt and obscurity. This is her short story with more character then a Faulkner novel, and more love then most families will ever know. She was the soft cradling mother of three generations, holding their hearts and all of their memories.
Now ghostly echoes remain. The second and the last tenant, the mother child who seeded the love and strangeness will fade. The house will rot, for that is its lot. The fireflies that once danced and blinked no longer come, the crickets now chirp their mournful songs. The mother inside loses what little dignity she has left as her mind falters and with her the strength of the house fails as well.
But there was a time when she shone with all the glory the world had to offer. There was so much love and fun. There was so much safety. There was so much history, maybe a millennia of history that lived with in only a century of time. My other mother, a mask for the last past that I had any link to. I speak to her with the trembling voice of a child waiting for his mother to die, knowing full well that when she passes I will have to depend on this imperfect memory of mine to remember, because she will be gone.
Somewhere a dog barks, a cat meows, the house creaks with the wind whipping harshly against its new aluminum siding; Just a temporary facelift for a dying beauty.