Our Center point

I look at my life and know that this is not how I imagined it when I was twelve, or sixteen, or even thirty-two. There was no frame of reference for this kind of solitude in my life. Family surrounded me, overwhelmed me, lived forever back then. . . . only two people ever went so far as California and one of them came back.

Our center point was the Big House, that place where five generations lived in time eternal. Somewhere I was never alone because no one ever really left. Whether it was Great Grandfather's chair in the library, or Great Grandmother's parrot cage in the dirt room; the old player piano in the front hall where my Grandmother sang The Old Rugged Cross, or the big homey kitchen with its potato and flour bins where my Aunt made homemade noodles, that house with its majestic fireplaces and homely bathing room was the place our family was still orbiting around when my children were small and toddling along the same old carpets their Great Great Grandfather had walked.

The scratchy horsehair love seat near the alcove downstairs, the cavernous garret-ed attic packed to the brim with old toys and wedding dresses, Indian moccasins and Greek Bibles, were where I played on rainy days.  On sunny ones I caught butterflies in the garden, or played in a white painted truck tire sandbox while grown-ups hung clothes on lines propped up by long poles and worked on cars in the huge converted barn-garage.

Babies were born here in the big downstairs bedroom, loved ones laid out in the formal parlor, squabbles and tears, hugs and stories were the continuity of family life that kept on going and going and going.

The front porch swing was for talking to company, the side porch glider for watching storms, we played croquet in the back yard and roses grew wild and lush in the side one.  Church was three blocks away, the grocery store just down an alley flanked with bachelor buttons and hollyhocks that could be made into dancing dolls.

Bought by a Civil War soldier,  weathering the crash and the depression, the Big House survived two world wars and a fire that burned down the family business, but it could not hold fast when the world became transient and families spread out across the country.

And now, it stands empty eyed and cold while I live in an apartment that would probably fit in any one room still there, but this house was Home with a capital H for generations of my family and it will remain so in my memory forever.