Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [38]
The following summer the garden became something else entirely, and any sense of regret or nostalgia I had about it was subsumed into a kind of wonder at how the orders we make vanish so quickly, subsumed. The whole house seemed to go into a kind of accelerated decline; paint peeling, fence pickets snapped, the cream-yellow of the clapboards (a Shaker sort of color, it had seemed to me when we chose it) dirtied with the soot of tired oil furnaces struggling to keep up. The building seemed to express the psychic life it held, as if it were grief’s outer skin.
Chris lived there for a while, then rented out the house, but he eventually found the payments impossible, the burden of the place overwhelming—and so it went back to the bank, to his sorrow and relief. I haven’t seen it now for a long time. I understand that some friends took various perennials from the garden, which is just a shining idea, now. Which, in a way, is what it always was, an idea given not flesh but leaf.
We did not rescue the house, as we’d thought we were doing, those years ago. Oh, we did for a while make it not merely habitable but lovely, maybe more so than it had ever been; even when it was brand new I suspect it was built to be workmen’s housing, and I doubt that love had been lavished upon its details. But the gleam of a loved house lasts only as long as he who loves it can keep polishing, keep occupying. What we did was to make for ourselves, for a while, a dwelling place, a deeply occupied zone in which to encounter and to recapitulate all our dwellings, a house deep enough, ours enough, to dream into. And then time swept us away, and in time took the house itself.
Did it? Perhaps now, repossessed, the place will be cheap enough again for somebody to come along flush and foolish with the sense of possibility, indifferent to the politics of location, with enough hubris to see some shining thing this sow’s ear can become this time. Apartments? Offices, or the flat indignity of a parking lot?
The birds are flitting about in the box alder; in their hurry to nest, have they found another site? The need must push at them, requiring that they try again—a more protected place, this time. Though isn’t it plain that no place is protected?
I enjoy the garden, this spring, but I don’t feel that imperative to shape, perhaps because I see how quickly it blows away, how swiftly occupancy changes. I remember Wally talking, one afternoon in December, at a time when his speech or his ideas weren’t always clear. I was rubbing his feet, which ached with cramps as they turned inward to point toward one another, his legs seeming to wither in front of us. Massage would ease the pains better than anything else, and so I was always at his feet, sometimes for a long time, a peaceful, steadying time to talk. “I wonder how many people,” he said, “had their feet rubbed in this house?” I understood he was talking about how many people had been sick here, really, in our room, how many had died here, in this house’s two hundred years. We knew that for most of this century one family lived here, and raised eleven children, enough people to generate generations of intensity, resonant moments and gestures of the sort that reverberate in a house. Before them, there aren’t any records, but since maybe 1790 people have been holding this house, and being held by it. I felt that Wally was experiencing himself, that moment, as part of that history; he was joining a community. As we did, in fact, when we bought this place, and set to work on it—just in time, as it turned out, to make a home around us for the onslaught. We had just enough time to do the essential things, to make the house feel like ours. This house is actually small enough for me to finish—someday—the projects we started. I love to be here in storms, when the low-slung roof sheds water, and I can feel the gravity of the big beams holding