Alone in my house this evening, listening to a Joni Mitchell album, I'm taken back to other times in other houses. I remember staying at a friend's house in Ohio through one of our breaks my senior year in college. It was winter, and the old wooden house was cold. It was the year of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years," which we listened to repeatedly and which seemed to set the mood for the place. I remember a photograph of my friend Tom and me enjoying our birthday dinner in that kitchen in late November with our dates. Tom and I were born one year and one day apart, and the woman who was then his date later became his wife. I lived in that house for only a few weeks, but some of the memories remain.
There was the house I lived in during law school. It was half of a duplex, and the landlady lived on the other side. Our half had six bedrooms, and six of us lived there. I had a room on the top floor with a slanted ceiling and a heating vent cut through the floor. That house was cold too. We tried to save money by keeping the thermostat set at about 62 degrees, colder than I liked it but the collective will of our group. I spent less time at that house than my housemates did, but I remember it well, set at the bottom of the hill, a long climb up the gorge path to the law school each day. One of the guys died quite a few years ago; I never learned the cause.
For two years after law school I lived in an apartment on Beacon Hill, near the bottom of Mt. Vernon Street. The floors were slanty and the walls and ceiling needed paint. The kitchen could barely fit three people standing, but it worked for me. I remember sitting at my desk on summer nights with the window open. I could hear the clip clop of a horse carrying a mounted policeman. Man and beast patrolled the streets late at night, always at the same time - I think it was 11:00 p.m. I'd listen to music then too, read books and write letters, and when there was a Red Sox game on, I'd watch t.v. This is where I lived when I met my wife, and I remember her dismay the first time she visited and she saw that all I had in my refrigerator were a couple of beers and a bottle of ketchup. Even thirty years after I moved out of that little place, our shared experience gives it special meaning.
And of course there was the house I grew up in. A small ranch house with three bedrooms on what once had been a quiet street but which became busier over time. My parents raised my sisters and me in that house, and it had many good memories, mostly of our aunts and uncles and cousins who would often stop by, unannounced, and who were always welcomed with an offer of a cup of coffee and food to go with it. I used to help my dad maintain the house and paint the trim. I helped him rake the leaves in the fall, and shovel the snow in the cold Rochester winters. Dad took good care of that house for many years. It seemed wrong that he wasn't there when I visited my Mom a few months after he died. It was his house, no one else's, and we all seemed like squatters then. It felt even more wrong a few years later when Mom no longer could live there on her own, and my sister had to sell it to a stranger.
That may have been the first time I really understood that we don't own our homes, or anything else for that matter. We just borrow them for a time and then move on. The experiences, the relationships, the memories, they are the only things we can call our own.
There was the house I lived in during law school. It was half of a duplex, and the landlady lived on the other side. Our half had six bedrooms, and six of us lived there. I had a room on the top floor with a slanted ceiling and a heating vent cut through the floor. That house was cold too. We tried to save money by keeping the thermostat set at about 62 degrees, colder than I liked it but the collective will of our group. I spent less time at that house than my housemates did, but I remember it well, set at the bottom of the hill, a long climb up the gorge path to the law school each day. One of the guys died quite a few years ago; I never learned the cause.
For two years after law school I lived in an apartment on Beacon Hill, near the bottom of Mt. Vernon Street. The floors were slanty and the walls and ceiling needed paint. The kitchen could barely fit three people standing, but it worked for me. I remember sitting at my desk on summer nights with the window open. I could hear the clip clop of a horse carrying a mounted policeman. Man and beast patrolled the streets late at night, always at the same time - I think it was 11:00 p.m. I'd listen to music then too, read books and write letters, and when there was a Red Sox game on, I'd watch t.v. This is where I lived when I met my wife, and I remember her dismay the first time she visited and she saw that all I had in my refrigerator were a couple of beers and a bottle of ketchup. Even thirty years after I moved out of that little place, our shared experience gives it special meaning.
And of course there was the house I grew up in. A small ranch house with three bedrooms on what once had been a quiet street but which became busier over time. My parents raised my sisters and me in that house, and it had many good memories, mostly of our aunts and uncles and cousins who would often stop by, unannounced, and who were always welcomed with an offer of a cup of coffee and food to go with it. I used to help my dad maintain the house and paint the trim. I helped him rake the leaves in the fall, and shovel the snow in the cold Rochester winters. Dad took good care of that house for many years. It seemed wrong that he wasn't there when I visited my Mom a few months after he died. It was his house, no one else's, and we all seemed like squatters then. It felt even more wrong a few years later when Mom no longer could live there on her own, and my sister had to sell it to a stranger.
That may have been the first time I really understood that we don't own our homes, or anything else for that matter. We just borrow them for a time and then move on. The experiences, the relationships, the memories, they are the only things we can call our own.
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