Four September 1996
FOUR
I’ve always found beauty in disrepair. I think this is the gift of poverty, to see something you know as debris, something others have cast off as useless.
I can see beautiful faces in the cracks of chipped plaster walls, I see the curls of a small child in the twisted roots of a maple tree.
I can see lives lived in the discarded furniture left to mildew and rot in backyards or the town dump.
I can close my eyes and see the lives of people who sat on those sofas, those long after-dinner talks in the thrown-off chairs.
Yet I wasn’t prepared for the shock of what had become of my grandmother’s home in the short time since she’d passed.
It had taken me two weeks to pack up the life I’d lived for nearly twenty years.
I didn’t return to work, putting my resignation in an email and giving Kiju’s home, my home, as a forwarding address.
I suppose a benefit of being single most of my life and living in the same small one-bedroom apartment is that my savings account had the opportunity to grow.
I had enough to last me a while, until I could decide the path I wanted to follow.
At forty-one years of age, I knew that the solitary life I had been living was no longer feasible.
I no longer had my grandmother to fall back on when I was lonely.
And I wasn’t sure why I thought that moving home would be the answer.
But grief has a strange influence over rational people; I’d seen this in my career as a nurse, and apparently I was no different.
I sold my furniture cheap to a grateful grad student in the same building and packed everything else I owned into the back of a rented U-Haul.
The last thing to leave was Kiju’s wooden box.
It sat on the counter that separated my small living room from my even smaller kitchen.
I dusted it off before opening it. There on the top were her recipes.
Such an integral part of my childhood. I picked up the stack of cards and ran my fingers along the edges of the thick paper.
I slid the twine aside and admired her cursive, slanted and perfect.
I knew then that I was doing the right thing, whatever that might be.
I placed the cards gently back where they had rested for far too long, closed the box and then the door behind me.
When I arrived at the house, it was dark.
The headlights illuminated the unmown lawn, a scattering of wildflowers but mostly untamed grass.
I grabbed the flashlight from the console, a small, dim thing but adequate for its purpose.
As I moved around to the back of the house, the night creatures fell silent, and I felt their reproach.
After all, I was the one who had abandoned this place while they had remained faithful.
My flashlight scanned the garden, overgrown with weeds, the small rows nearly imperceptible under the wild growth that comes from neglect.
The little food that had managed to break through the mess had been dug up, eaten by mice or rabbits, the mounds of brown soil proof of their scavenging.
My heart sank at the sight, and I imagined how disappointed Kiju would be if she were alive to see this.
The key struggled with the lock. A few curse words, some jostling, and the door finally opened with an awful whine.
In the pale glow of my flashlight, I was surprised to see how much dust had accumulated in a house that had rarely seen dust. The familiar scents that I associated with my grandmother were gone, replaced by the smell of mouse droppings and rot.
How quickly a home can give up on itself when not lived in.
As I walked through the house, footprints in the dust marking my way, I realized what I had let happen.
The floor creaked and groaned under my feet in ways it never had before.
The door to Kiju’s bedroom hung loose. She had always cared for the house.
Ben, when he came for picking, would fix what needed to be fixed, but the pickers didn’t come anymore, and she was older.
It had been my responsibility, and I should have known.
This house was everything to her and I should have cared enough to visit more, to see what was happening, but I was so involved with my own life. I’d let her down.
A cry caught in my throat when I saw my bed, still made, the blankets covered in dust but still there, waiting for me.
The rest of the house was an abandoned museum of my childhood.
And I understood then that this little house was never meant to be empty.
There were too many souls waiting on my return.
The grief that came with the knowledge that I had abandoned something so important drove me out of the house.
There was a penance to be paid for staying away so long, for visiting only at Christmas or a weekend in the summer, for pretending that my history, my family, was something from the past to be forgotten, not spirits that walked beside me each day.
I locked the door and returned to the car.
I knew I couldn’t sleep inside, I hadn’t earned that right just yet.
Ben once told me that “all things worth doing take time and a little elbow grease.” This might be the first time in my life that sentence made genuine sense to me.
I would earn my right to my own home. I would make amends for leaving everything behind, and I promised I would never do it again.
The next morning, sore from sleeping in my car—the front seats leaned back but still not enough to call it comfortable—I went back inside the house.
The daylight brought new realizations. The night before, I hadn’t noticed that a window was broken, completely empty of glass, spots of mould had started to develop on the ceiling where water must have leaked through, the broken window an entry for the rain, the wind, and a person.
That’s when I noticed the initials carved into the wooden table my grandfather had made.
An open wound, the yellow insides of what was once a tree rough and uneven, grotesque against the wood stain.
Someone had been here in my absence. Someone had thought this house was abandoned and that they had the right to do with it as they wanted.
I don’t appreciate colour the way some people do.
When I see wood painted over with a colour, or even plain white, I cringe.
The beautiful grains of wood, the twists and turns of age lines, stories of long winters and wet springs written in the grain—that’s what I love.
My grandmother never painted the wood in our little house.
She always left it as nature intended. Only wood stain was permitted.
My grandfather made his own by soaking tobacco in a liquid mixture.
The recipe was no longer part of our family history.
Kiju and I used commercial stains. But some of the older pieces of wood in the house still smell faintly of tobacco when it rains.
Or at least my brain imagines that they do.
Seeing those initials, the blistered wood bright against the dark stain, reminded me that I was the one who had allowed this to happen.
I left the table and continued to walk through the house, careful to avoid the soft spots on the floor, the wood still covered in dust and the webs weaved by industrious spiders.
I used my scarf—a decorative one, not one used for warmth, its thin material covered in birds in flight—to wipe away some of the dust. Leaves had gathered in the wash basin and there were mouse droppings all over the wooden countertop.
It smelled like decay but a natural kind, the kind that comes with nature taking back what is rightfully hers.
I used the scarf again to clean the leaves out of the dirty sink, gathering a few dead spiders with them.
I scooped them onto the floor but then felt compelled to sweep them up.
I knew that the broom hung just on the other side of the door that led to the wood room.
I opened the door and it creaked loudly, the hinges protesting movement after existing so long in stillness.
There was no light, so I reached around and felt for the broom and found it in the same place it had always been.
The handle was crooked, carved from a branch, straw bunched at the end.
The branch had a curve in it and my hand fit nicely into it.
That broom was made for you. Fits perfect.
From now on, I will let you do the sweeping up.
I could hear Kiju laugh and turned around to see only the faint light of a clouded sun permeate the one intact window, cracked and old, the waves of melted sand obscuring the outside. And instead of crying, I smiled.
I swept the leaves out the door and leaned the broom against the wall and headed to my car.
I retrieved the paper towels I keep in the car to clean up my messes, hot coffee, fast food.
I’m a spiller. I went into the house and grabbed the same bucket I’d grabbed that day so long ago when Sally arrived, her belly big and round.
I never thought to check the tap to see if it still worked, forgetting that in the country we have wells and payment is not required to keep it flowing as it is in the city.
Instead, I headed directly for the water pump.
It seemed to be what the house required.
It took another two days before I realized that the tap did indeed work and the natural spring water was as cold and crisp as it had always been.
The pump was not in great shape, but after a few hard pushes the water started to trickle and then gush out.