Trading Places
“Going to a garage sale at your old house right now!”
This text came to me a year ago from my young friend Molly, who’d purchased and rehabbed a fixer-upper in my hometown of Bath some months before. When I first visited her, she and I walked the extended neighborhood so I could show her where various mean girls had beaten me up, which in turn brought us to my family’s former home of 52 years. That’s how Molly knew where I grew up and how, since I was already traveling to the area that day of her text, I later found myself walking up the long driveway to my past.
Our 1858 farmhouse was built in what’s called the railroad-car style, with one room connected to the next in a straight line that stretches away from the street toward a cupolaed, hulking barn. Our neighbor Eric used to store his surplus antiques in the barn loft — a black bouncy baby buggy, a leather horsehair sofa, steamer trunks, busted caned chairs hanging on nails from the rafters, a spinning wheel, a wooden wheelchair with caned back and seat — and don’t try to tell me that place wasn’t haunted. As was our third-floor attic. Once, when I was up there gathering wrapping paper, the light — a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling — clicked off. My feet never hit the two flights of stairs to get me to the kitchen, where my mother likely dismissed my shrieks with an exhale from her cigarette and a scold that I was watching too much Dark Shadows and not to be so dramatic.
I hardly glanced at the house as I walked up the driveway. I knew that the people who bought it from Mom gutted and redid the interior — just as my parents did when they moved in. When the house went back on the market, there was a virtual online tour. I didn’t recognize a single room.
Various items for sale were displayed on tables and blankets — shoes, lamps, kitchenware — but I didn’t pause. I was drawn to the barn. As I approached, a tinny radio tuned to the oldies station blasted from a corner. I wanted to yank the plug out of the outlet. Our kitchen cupboards were mounted on the back wall, obviously moved out there during the renovation and repurposed for storage. That, for some reason, also made me mad. And that’s when I started to cry. I ventured up to the loft, tremors of childhood terror momentarily gripping me, but as I poked my head up into the space, all I saw was a table and a couple boxes shoved in a corner. What was I expecting, Barnabus Collins?
When I wandered out to inspect the “vast” woods behind the barn, I couldn’t believe how puny they looked. I could even see through to the next street. And that’s when I was startled by a voice.
“I’m sorry, that’s private property. You’re not permitted back there.”
I slowly turned around, like a specter who’d just drifted down from that loft, tears still on my face, and said, “I’m sorry. I should have identified myself. This is my childhood home.”
The next thing I knew, an arm was threaded through mine and I was whisked inside. We went from room to room, but like on the virtual tour, I saw nothing familiar, except doors — doors to closets, to the cellar and attic, from room to room. Portals from one place to another.
As I was preparing to leave, I ran into my mother’s neighbor Bill. He took one look at me and burst into tears. As did his wife, Kathy, when he swept me next door. We sat and cried, I’m not even sure why. The passage of time? Once my parents were the new kids on the block. Then, after my father’s death, my mother eventually grew to be the grand dame of High Street, until she downsized to a condo and other lives and stories papered over the Peavey years. Just as Molly is creating a new story in her home. And just as my husband and I did when we bought our house, and just as the person who now owns it is.
And just as I’m about to do. After seven years adrift, I’ve finally found a place to settle.
I spent my 20s wandering. By choice. These past years were more complicated: the end of my marriage, a pandemic, and then the insane housing market. I’m fortunate. I’ve had the resources to access places to live. I’ve just had nowhere to call home.
Home. It’s such a simple word, yet so complicated for so many in a world in which trying to find safe and secure shelter is increasingly criminalized. It’s enough to make me want to keep hiding out here with my tree and squirrel friends.
But no. It’s time to end my woods life and return — not to Portland, as I thought I would — but somewhere new. I’m ready to start another story.
Elizabeth Peavey haunts these pages monthly.
