Last week, my uncle-in-law’s house burned to the ground. Thankfully he was alone in the house and woke up when the smoke alarm went off. He managed to call the fire department and get outside before the fire spread to the rest of the house.
The local fire department managed to save the garage, and had to spray down another house – owned by my in-laws – not 500 feet away to keep it from bursting into flames. Some charred framework was all that was left of the main house by morning.
My wife’s grandfather grew up in the two-story building. He and his wife lived there for decades before they traded living spaces with their son, who took the house and moved them into an appropriately-sized apartment for two seniors with limited mobility. My wife grew up in a house just down the hill from the burned building, and reacted as if her parents home had gone up in flames, too.
She happened to be going home this week, and described the scene “as if it were a dream.” For her, that building was more than a house; it was a symbol of home, it reminded her of her own childhood and I would even say it was a part of her.
I only knew the place as the house up the hill from my in-laws. I had seen it change owners from her grandparents to her uncle and I went to a few family gatherings in the backyard. While I’m not as affected by the loss of the building as my wife or her family, I can relate to the sick feeling you get in your stomach when something you knew as a child is no longer there.
When I was a kid, I used to watch my mother, grandmother and several aunts jam themselves into a small hallway that served as the pantry for my grandparent’s house on Louds Island. They cursed the design of that kitchen until my grandfather finally had a contractor knock down the walls and install new appliances to create a kitchen my entire extended family fits into.
About the same time they were renovating the kitchen, several of my aunts and cousins moved away, found jobs and some even started families of their own. Part of me would gladly trade the now spacious and often empty modern kitchen for that small, crowded, grimy pantry full of laughing family members.
To get to their island house, we used to take a 1969 Chevrolet Suburban with oversized tires, no brakes and a clutch that had a habit of sticking, up a hill, and through a forest. My cousins and I would line up on the bench seats to watch the tree branches eerily scrape down the sides of the truck. Inevitably, a rock would reach up from the road and tap the bottom of the rear axle halfway up the hill, causing my grandfather to burst into obscenities, sending us into fits of laughter.
A couple of years ago, my grandfather bought a John Deer Gator, and the old suburban has sat quietly behind the barn ever since, the green paint my father and I applied with house brushes slowly peeling off its rusted panels.
Like my wife’s house on the hill, the crowded kitchen and old suburban gave me the memories that help me know who I am and where I came from.
Losing the things we knew as children, whether it be a house, a favorite pet or possession or even something as small as a Christmas stocking isn’t easy, but I think rising above the nostalgia and rebuilding for the next generation is a large part of growing up.
                                                                         -Nate Jones