Vignette #1: That Old House
June 11, 2015 December 24, 2015 ~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments
This is the first in a series of short reflections I’ll be posting in the coming weeks. I’ve always enjoyed writing vignettes – small snippets that capture a very specific moment in time, a person, or a place. My writing often takes this form, and I thought I’d tug these words out of my notebook and Google Docs folder, and start posting again. This is actually a monologue I wrote for a radio club I’m a member of. We were partnered up and told to create a soundscape/experimental sound piece around the other person’s words. My partner and I have yet to do this, but the written piece alone means a lot to me. Here’s vignette number 1 – I hope you enjoy.
When I was growing up, I always thought it was a castle. It was the biggest house I had ever seen, which wasn’t much, coming from small town northern Ontario. The house held equal part memory and personality. That clinically-mint kitchen-bedroom combination on the second floor, those floral sheets spread clean over single beds. The back stairway that led from my parents’ room down into the kitchen. The couches wrapped in plastic that squeaked as I flipped through a decade of dusty yearbooks.
It was my gramps’ house and it was our summer retreat, until it wasn’t anymore.
We got older and that house got older and my gramps got older, too. Today only the first two remain, and no one looks the same.
A few summers ago I returned to that town and stood on the sidewalk across the street from that old house, the castle of my childhood. It had been years, and I expected it to look different – reclaimed by another family and by other children with active imaginations and toys to scatter the front yard. But it was the same. The red paint on the porch was peeled back, worn clean along a track where I learned to ride my tricycle. The doorbell was the same white turn knob, a rusty ring that percussed along with the sound of screen door slams.
Inside the front window, there was a ladder, and a room half painted. Memories were in the midst of being covered and refreshed, but they would never be forgotten. They run deeper than any paint, than any furniture. Still the transformation was underway, from a place that was mine, to a place that was theirs.
I spent my summers growing up in that old house, but never as much as in that moment.