My Friend's House

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Not me but you get the seventies vibe (minus the American flag)

The street looks mostly the same; a neighborhood from the seventies with wide driveways, big lawns, houses with stained aluminum siding and tall street lights good for evening ball hockey games as much as late night suburban traffic. I don’t know if they still do, but kids around here used to build forts out of sheets and kitchen chairs then run alongside train tracks with shoelaces untied. Half naked bodies in all shapes and sizes, glistening from a layer of baby oil, suntanned next to boom boxes sitting in overgrown grass. I don’t even have to close my eyes to see the carefree messiness of the ‘old days’ when I look down this street. The smell of grass clippings, chemical weed killer and home perms comes back to me easily. My parents sold our family home some time ago and my father has since passed away. I’ve had no reason to come back here… until now. Another house is being packed up - the door closing for good on the ghosts of another childhood. One of my oldest friends has just lost her dad and she’s come back to put the house up for sale. Any reason she had for coming back will soon be gone too. The oxygen that passes from sentimental hands to old walls, breathing life into random memories, will soon be cut off, replaced by fresh air and optimistic fingertips. I pull into her driveway, steps away from my old house, trying not to let the lump in my throat liquefy and choke me up.

Her house is already mostly empty. A bin sits in the driveway and the garage is neatly arranged with folding tables displaying items for sale; a lifetime emptied out of a house in a matter of days. Been there. I walk up to her door, trying not to look toward my old house. I know it’s different now - a new colour, fewer trees, a bigger fence. Our family has been scrubbed out and painted over, our voices muffled under renovations I can’t even see. Here and there, now and then, I miss having no place left to visit, no portal to step back in time and remember what is was like to be small and reaching for things. To me, our house was a virtual reality trip to the past, every creak and crack animating a moment in time and telling my story back to me. Without our old home, I feel like a rocket launched years ago, continually in orbit, with no place left to circle back to, my home planet lost to me. I liked being reminded in 3D that I came from somewhere; a floor that held me up, walls that kept me safe and windows that provided a view of the world as I needed or imagined it to be.

Her vacuum is loud and she hasn’t heard me come in. Not even the creaky stairs give me away, so I shout.

“Hello? Hey, Tanya!”

She hears me and looks up.

“Hey you!”

Despite Covid, we decide to hug (both fully vaccinated). The sadness of losing her dad is trumped by the business of what needs to be done now. I’m heartened to hear that I am late to the game and friends have been in and out all weekend, helping to lift, move, sort and pitch.

“How are you at cleaning?”

“I’m a Virgo - that’s kinda my thing.” I smile, ready to get to work.

There isn’t much else that needs to be said. Friends since grade two - if she needs me to clean, I’ll clean. The walls, the floors, the furniture that’s still in place, the closets - it all needs a good once over. Cobwebs, dust bunnies and fingerprints on windows from hands that no longer exist. I’m ready. We go to the kitchen and she gives me the inventory of supplies. I start with her parents' room.

Her parents. They’re both gone now. And soon Tanya will be too - back to Florida where she has lived for many years.

I vacuum, dust, wipe the walls, polish the furniture and shake out the curtains. I know this room; the double paned windows that rattle when you close a door, the thin white baseboards that collect dust deep into the seam. I look out the window into her backyard, knowing I can’t see my old house from here, but I try anyway. These houses are all similar - double garages, big kitchen windows, skinny plank hardwood floors, worn black in some spots from heavy foot traffic and life. I turn toward the door and look out into the hallway, blinking as an old memory materializes in front of me. I see her mom heading down the stairs, a tall leggy blonde, hollering something to us as we head out the door - typical teens ignoring our elders. Wherever we were going, I’m pretty sure her mom was not entirely in the know. Teenage girls are clever that way. And we were clever.

“Heading over to Jen’s house!” meant any number of things. Perhaps it meant ‘we’re headed to the concert at Molson Park where we plan to hop the fence, get in for free then sneak into the beer tent without ID’. That may or may not have happened.

Neither of us were allowed a car too often so I’m sure we either bounced over to the bus stop at the end of her street or actually went over to Jen’s house for a ride - her parents were much more generous with the family car, and much less concerned with how many of us got in the family car. Cool parents.

I see Tanya’s mom smile as we leave, all giggles and mystery. Her mom always wanted to talk a little more but Tanya regularly threw her a “Ma! Goodbye!”

Her mom, slender and cheerful, rounds the corner and heads into the kitchen. We are long gone, rushing off to find trouble. The memory fades and it’s just me again, clutching the overstuffed vacuum in the empty bedroom. I turn back to my job at hand, to the now, knowing there’s no one in the kitchen and Molson Park concert grounds were sold off to commercial development years ago, another piece of my youth wiped out. If the park were still there, and a band were in town, who knows, maybe we’d be heading to the beer tent for a quick drink after our cleaning - either through the front entrance or over the fence for old times sake. We are painfully unaware of our age at times and may have attempted the jump.

Some of the old gang (Keri is taking the picture). Tanya top left, me, bottom right. We are 16 maybe??

I open the closet and get up on a chair, ready to wipe down the shelves. The shelf paper, a dark brown vinyl with tiny faded flowers, covers each thin shelf. Pieces of the paper curl in the corners and the top has a long tear. The closet doors are the same wobbly, faux wood panel we had in our bedrooms at home. Running my fingers through the dust atop the sagging shelf is eerily familiar. It wasn’t too long ago that I was wiping down the shelves in my old house. I crane my neck to look over my shoulder as another memory takes up space in the present. My mom is standing in the centre of the kitchen, each cupboard is empty and every pot, pan and Tupperware set is spread out on the floor in piles, all except the dishes that will be taken to the new apartment in assisted living. My dad, frail and upset, sits in his chair outside the kitchen. The cupboard doors are left open, exposing the shelf paper my mom carefully placed in each cupboard over the years, refreshing it as needed. In every room, in every closet, there was shelf paper in different designs, signaling pride of ownership and adding a dash of personality to the innards of our home. I’m sure Wayfair has jazzed up the latest incarnation of shelf paper, but my hand aches for the thick old vinyl kind as though it held a soothing heartbeat.

I lift my hand to break the reverie so I can get back to my cleaning. I drag the vacuum and supplies over to the next room. I am instantly welcomed back to the 80’s by the decor, and of course, I feel right at home. There is wallpaper trim, emerald green walls, seashell shaped lamps and a gold trimmed dresser. The only proof of the 2000’s is a desktop computer that seems terribly out of place. It looks like the set of an 80’s teen movie temporarily set up as an office for a crew member. Wallpaper is peeling off the closet doors that hang slightly off track, and inside, more shelf paper on shelves. I hear Tanya come up the stairs.

“I put that wallpaper up in here myself.” she muses.

“It’s awesome.” We smirk at each other.

From beyond the wallpaper, another scene plays out in my mind. I see her dad raising a glass and toasting a small gathering of all our friends in the backyard; all of us in patterned dresses and frosted lipstick. It’s graduation (which one I can’t quite remember) and we’re gathered among her parents prized rose bushes, melting in the sun. People used to have their wedding photos taken in her impressive backyard - ponds, roses, bridges and trimmed hedges. The house was regularly featured on the Horticultural Society tours. I used to watch the cars arriving from my living room window. Her dad was a complicated man who had a complicated relationship with his daughter (and us). But I remember that garden party. All was normal for a day. Now…the yard is overgrown, ornamental grasses well over six feet tall, and garden treasures are strangled beneath vines that seem to begin and end nowhere. There is a shed full of antiques, buried at the back of the yard. More ghosts. The glory days of the yard are long gone, along with the perfect hardwood floors and unblemished shelf paper indoors. Everything that’s left is worn and heavy with time. The wallpaper not quite as green as it once was.

Becky and I, another of the old friends, slip into the backyard to dig up some of the overgrown perennials, hoping to transplant them in our own yards. Maybe they will flourish and find new life with us, and one day, our children and their friends will dig them up again, as they clean house as we are doing now. Such is life. We laugh, dig, reminisce, and help Tanya sort through her dad’s backyard treasures tangled both in the past and the weeds. Our laughter is the same as it’s always been, just a few more laugh lines at the source.

By day's end, visitors stop coming and most of the work is done. It’s just Tanya and I again, talking, like we have done for so many years.

“Am I doing the right thing?” she asks, wondering if it’s okay to sell the house. “Will it feel okay to let it go?”

“Yes. Your life is in Florida now, with your kids.”

Let go. Easier said than done. I pull and tug on one more ornamental grass. It comes free, the roots fragile in the sun. We toss the plant in my car, hoping it will survive the transplant. The garage is organized and the rooms inside sparkling. It already feels different. The ‘familiar’ wiped away, dug up. The house, like the hole in the ground, is ready to be filled in, ready for whatever comes next.

By Carol Sloan 

For Tanya. And special shout out to Jon Tobin for all his help.

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