A rickety screen door teetered on rusty hinges as I pulled it open and stepped into the tiny ante-space that introduced the kitchen. I paused, allowing my eyes to adjust to the dim light as I inhaled the musty scent of things old. In the quiet, I waited for the space to speak. Who knew what had lain settled in memory’s crevices for more than half a century?
Time warped as I stepped into the kitchen and looked around, surprised. It was a miniature version of the space that, moments earlier, I’d have sworn was a large farmhouse kitchen. Contradictory images tumbled past my mind’s eye. The dimensions fell short of what qualified as an “eat-in kitchen” by today’s standards. Yet, my family—two adults and three children under seven—once gathered around a seemingly too-small-for-five-people Formica table. My mother served our meals from the stovetop, mere inches from where she sat. Staring at the place where the table once stood, my heart thumped once, hard. I pictured my mother seated at the foot of the table, weary—hungry for more than anyone bothered to imagine.
A nuclear family headed by a hardworking man who returns home each day to his wife and eats dinner with her and their kids seems quaint compared to the frantic rituals practiced in myriad forms by twenty-first-century families. Unfortunately, my nuclear image was an illusion. Its structure hadn’t stood a chance against the undercurrents of violence and dysfunction running wild beneath its surface. Memory is a trickster, given to distortions of material and psychic pasts. A blurse—as much blessing as curse—if ever there was one.
Reminding myself that I’d not come to ruminate on a past that could never be other than it was, I took a single step onto narrow boards of hardwood in the adjacent, also tiny, living room. An air of melancholy hovered stale in the dim light. The swell of a soft hum broke what I’d mistaken for silence, animating layers of dust long settled in corners and the creases of heavy drapes that hung like ill-fitting suits on sagging rods atop tall windows.
My sandals sank into grooves of aged hardwood, scar-tracked by a half-century of being trodden upon. Glancing down, I pictured my feet toddler-small—two among many that had worn the slats thin—and stepped gingerly across the wooden page. The boards cried out in creak. Can I get a witness? There was no telling what stories were inscribed on the rachitic surface or whose. Were they asking to be remembered or begging not to be disturbed?
Crouching low, my knees cracked as I adopted the vantage point of my child-self and passed a bare palm, soft, across the floor, stroking the rawness of its once-glossy surface. Rising straight, I stretched, surveying the tiny living space, brushing floor dust from palm with palm. Sympathy for the burden the surface carried came easily. My own stories carried heavy enough. No wonder the floor was tired.
There, in the ancient apartment at the front of the old farmhouse, the past introduced itself to the present. I closed my eyes, absorbed the hum, found its melody, and sank into sigh and whisper.
Bless the bittersweet.
