Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [7]
Johnny, my mother’s boyfriend, was already living with us then and a comfortable part of our lives. He did most of the housework; having been in the navy, he cleaned the house as if he were a seaman swabbing the deck of a ship. I would come home, the floors wet and the house smelling so strongly of ammonia that my eyes would burn.
It was a cozy house. It had a roomy kitchen with a deep porcelain sink, and a view over the sink to the train tracks and the huge field beyond, where men would hunt rabbits in the fall. The muffled faraway gunshots were exciting. Even now, the memory of coming in through the back door into the linoleum kitchen and encountering the small kitchen table gives me pleasure. Why this house on Polonia Street stays with me so permanently and why it is the place I can most easily see Paul and me as children is a mystery. Maybe it is because the house was comfortable, cozy and simple, and we lived there with Johnny as a family. It was a happy time, a brief period of calm.
This recollecting of houses has been a kind of reverse senescence with me: the older I get, the more I remember of the places where I lived as a child, and the more valuable the past has seemed to become. In my darker moments, when the past shimmers with more appeal than the future, I know to be on my guard—a melancholic mood is about to fall over me. It is like the premonitory aura that precedes a migraine headache. I recall some homes that Paul can’t, which makes sense since I am almost four years older than he. He has recalled one or two that I have forgotten. He has always had the better memory, right down to the details of the model-airplane decals that we pasted on our knotty-pine bunk beds. He remembers that I slept on the upper bunk, he on the bottom. But I have one big memory on him: our father. Paul was only three when our father left us. I remember him as an actual person in our lives. For Paul, he is a name on a birth certificate.
So maybe the explanation for why I had those pine trees cut down was that I couldn’t bear to leave them behind while they held the potential to be a house. I must have known deep in my heart that I was about to enter another unsettled period of my life when homes would slip out from under me as they did in my boyhood and I would be on the move again. In any event, the trees came down and yielded an impressive amount of lumber—a seriously big pile of wood.
At this point in the dream, the one that cracked, Paul was already ensconced in his suburban life, having himself recently ended a long relationship and begun another. He brought his five children into his new marriage. His new wife brought three. I was his best man. There was a Catholic wedding followed by life in the big house with the lawn and all the kids. It was right about then that he offered me a patch of his backyard to store the lumber. This would have been 1996. You might say we were both in transit: he into a marriage, and I on the way out.
It still amazes me that Paul never had the mess of wood hauled away to make room for a shed or more grass in his subdivision, an Iowa of lawns. His neighbors in their supersized colonials could not have been pleased with the woodpile and its perpetual halo of tall weeds, which caught leaves, papers and the occasional plastic bag. Yet it was always there—under snow or sodden leaves, depending on the season—when I came to visit him for Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving.
After the trees had been cut and my wife and I sold the house and our fifteen country acres, I soon left Portland, where I had become the newspaper’s editor, and traveled to a new job in Philadelphia. We were separated at first, and then divorced. I worked in Philadelphia, at another newspaper, and