The House that Was

“How hard it is to escape from place. However carefully one goes they hold you – you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences – little rags and shreds of your very life.” – Katherine Mansfield

Today the house across the street was torn down. It was an old house, small and weathered. In the time that we have lived in this neighborhood, five families have lived there. The second family loved that house a great deal. They graced it with new floors and fresh paint. With wider, brighter windows and bluebells and roses in a newly dug garden. They gave it a lovely old bright red door that I admired and coveted.

But they grew their two boys there until they grew too big for the house, and they sold it and went away. And this week, after a succession of families that loved it less and less, it was stripped of what wealth it could offer, wires left dangling like torn spider webs, windows vacant and staring. This morning the backhoes and electric saws descended and the house dropped to the ground in shuddering thumps – a cacophony of anguish joined by the screeching of the torn limbs and severed trunks of the equally old and once loved trees that also came down behind it.

Poor, sad old house.

Our neighborhood is very different than when we moved here 17 years ago. Seeing the empty place where once there had been memories and living made me realize that place needs to be paid attention to. That if we are not aware, if we don’t pay attention, that place changes, and changes us, in ways that we may not notice until we are aware of a loss. And we may not even have known that that loss was ours to feel.

So . . . the purpose of this blog is to record the quotidian wanderings, the ordinary observations of a ‘place’ from day to day. The minutiae, the finer points, the trivialities of a place – the ‘place’ in which my life is lived.