Ode to Home

Dream:

I dream about selling my home and then regretting the sale, feeling panicked, helpless, as though I am drowning or suffocating. I am on edge, frantic when I awaken, as if I have lost the most important thing in my life. I want a second chance: What was I thinking? How could this be? I beg, I implore: “I want to do this over again. I want to be forgiven, to be exonerated. I made a terrible, terrible error. I need to undo the sale. I did not mean to get rid of my house. I have to get it back! It’s the only place I belong! It’s my home!”

I have had this dream once or twice a year over my entire adulthood. In one of them, I sobbed on the lap of the Realtor, telling her I would die if I could not get the house back. Last night, I was screaming in the dream and no one was listening.

When I was a small child, I used to dream of big brown horrible moths flying toward me. I had this dream frequently and woke up each time crying out of fear. I was little and the world was big. I was scared of my own father. I was not in control of my life. My family lived in a white stucco house then, in a suburb about 45 minutes from Manhattan. I lived there from the first through the fourth grade and I never liked it. The three-story house was built into a hill at the end of a cul-de-sac. Inside the front door were steps to the right, going down into the cavernous living room. Straight ahead was the dining room, which had a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the living room below. My sister and I created plays that we performed on this balcony for imaginary audiences seated on the living room sofas. Behind the kitchen there were maids’ quarters: a bedroom, bathroom and laundry room. A series of maids lived with us. One was found drinking my father’s bourbon. Another left without giving notice. I think no one stayed very long. In between hires, I liked going into the maids’ rooms. They were simple, small, painted a pale shade of yellow. There was only one piece of artwork on the walls: a print of a painting by Andrew Wyeth called Wind from the Sea. I loved this picture with all of my young heart. An open window, gossamer curtains dancing in the wind, the field outside with a road vanishing into the mysterious distance. I wondered if the women who stayed with us, who fed us and cleaned for us, I wondered if they loved the framed picture the way I did. It is hard to know why a house is scary to a child, but this one was to me. The stucco encrusted the house the way a plaster cast encases a mangled limb. The interior walls of the hallways were rough, textured with cement, mimicking the outside of the house. If a person bumped into one of these walls, skin abrasions and bruises would result. The rooms themselves were odd, each one so different from the next. The den on the main floor was paneled in pine full of big knots and what my parents called wormholes. They loved this “real” look. To me, the wood appeared tortured, the burls and bumps looked like injuries. I hated the room. My father spent much of his time there, when he was not commuting to work in the city. Once I cautiously entered the room where he was reading the paper. My mother had urged me to ask him to help me memorize the multiplication tables. He put his paper down and started quizzing me. When I had trouble with the sevens table, he said loudly: What’s the matter with you? I left the room crying, and to this day, I have trouble multiplying by seven.

My younger sister and I shared a long rectangular room upstairs, shaped like a narrow pencil box. Our beds were at opposite ends and we shared an adjoining bathroom. When I think about this oddly shaped room, I feel gripped by anxiety. It was painted a chalky pink and we had matching dressers. There were two small closets in the room and I often made a little nest in mine for my stuffed animals and a few dolls. My parents’ bedroom was across the cement-textured hallway from our room. Both my parents smoked, my mother in a nonstop fashion, and I remember seeing ashes flowing over the rims of their ashtrays in the morning. My father’s ashtray was also full of grape stems, peach pits, or orange rinds, the detritus of fruit. He loved eating fruit and smoking cigarettes in bed while he read the business section of the New York Times.

Our stucco home in the suburbs was, I imagine, an attempt by my New York City parents to live in the “country,” to have neighbors, maybe barbecues, to send us to a safe, small public elementary school. The back of the house faced a protected nature reserve, so we definitely got the “country” experience. I played in those woods until the snow fell each year, making little playgrounds for the chipmunks, my favorite backyard rodent. I had a rich imaginary life out there, which I rarely brought inside. My parents ended up disliking most of the neighbors, and the posse of kids on the block was a stingy bunch. When we played “house” or “family,” I was allowed only to be the “visitor.”

So when my parents announced we would be relocating to the city, I was excited. We moved into a fourth-floor apartment in a 20-story building. There were two sets of elevators in the building. The apartment was spacious. My sister and I each had our own bedroom with a shared bathroom in between. The large living room, which faced 85th Street, was lined with built-in bookcases and cabinets for a stereo system. At the end of a long, dramatic hallway were the dining room, kitchen and maid’s room. Life changed for everyone in this home. My mother returned to work full-time; my father was no longer commuting, but still continuing to do house calls as a cardiologist. My sister and I were sent to a public school three blocks away where I learned the words “shit” and “fuck.” I also learned about Spanish question marks: I thought they looked like court jesters standing on their heads.

It was a lonely place, except when my parents had parties, which they started doing with some frequency. For such occasions, the maid wore a different uniform, with a white apron tied at the waist. We got to stay up late and my parents were more lighthearted and bubbly than they were routinely. We were allowed to mingle with the “company” at the beginning of the evening, and later we got our dinners on trays in our rooms. When it was time for bed, we were summoned into the dining room and we made the rounds saying goodnight with a hug or a handshake to all the guests. The only reason I could tolerate this obligatory performance was the security that came from knowing my parents would be warmly affectionate toward us. Maybe it was the wine or the wish to appear nurturing; whatever motivated them, I looked forward to feeling their approval. I thought they might even be proud of us, but I was never sure how much of it was real.

Two years later, we moved again, this time only three blocks away, to the top three floors of a six-story brownstone. It was on 82nd Street, two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This new home changed my parents’ lives and I suppose ours, too, and it would define the last years of my life living in Manhattan. I started the seventh grade at an all-girls private school about 20 blocks away. I left home each day, took the Lexington Avenue bus to school, and walked home if it was not dark outside. I liked taking my time getting home after school. Only the maid and my younger sister would be there; it was the place, the accumulation of rooms and hallways that I felt almost repelled by.

The building was owned by a famous playwright. She was notorious for hating children; many of her characters were malicious, conniving youngsters responsible for bringing harm to the adults in their lives. I imagined my parents had to sing our praises as quiet, well-mannered children to get the playwright to rent half of her building to us. We saw her infrequently, but often heard her comings and goings from the tiny elevator we all shared. Caretakers of the building lived on the main floor in an apartment that faced a sweet courtyard. The second and third floors were the playwright’s home, and the fourth, fifth and sixth floors were ours. The bedrooms were on the fourth floor. My sister and I had our own rooms that shared a common wall. My room was painted powder blue and my sister’s was a mustard yellow. We shared a large, spacious bathroom; the floor was made of small, white hexagonal marble tiles. There was a tall dresser in the bathroom, between the tub and the sink, used as a linen closet for the two of us. Down a long hallway was my parents’ bedroom in addition to an enormous dressing room for my mother and a bathroom with one sink and a very deep bathtub. My mother’s kidneyshaped desk was in their bedroom. It was underneath her desk that she kept her Remington typewriter, the one I started borrowing for days at a time. It was in this house and on this typewriter that I started writing poetry. The discovery of writing, I feel sure, saved my life in this strange house on 82nd Street.

There was a winding staircase up to the fifth floor, on which were the living room (with floor-to-ceiling French windows and Swiss eyelet draperies), the galley kitchen, a spacious and austere dining room (one wall was lined in smoked glass, and if you gazed at yourself while you were eating, it looked as though you were in a room that had been set on fire), a small outdoor patio (furnished with a tiny café table and two black wire chairs) on the other side of which was a spacious room painted burnt umber, my father’s study.

Over the years, I got into serious trouble in the dark brown room. I used to sneak into it at night because it had a huge picture window overlooking the backs of the buildings on 83rd Street. I loved looking into the windows of other people’s apartments. There was a nudist couple living in one, and since I had never seen a naked male person (other than my infant cousin), I got a safe education of sorts. I watched people eating dinner, couples having fights, watching television, putting kids to bed. It was like a small Cineplex. My father did not like my being in his office (which, by the way, he never went into other than to store his New England Journal of Medicine issues and file his financial statements). There were so many rooms we were not supposed to go into: the living room was completely off limits (I used to think of it as one of those roped off rooms in a museum, depicting a scene from some historical period), the dining room (unless we were having a meal), and of course, his brown study. We were not supposed to sit on their bed unless they were in it; we got into trouble if we brought food to our bedrooms, unless the food was on a tray; we could not make noise in the tiny elevator because we might disturb the famous playwright.

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When I was 18, I left New York, never to return — other than for short visits. My last night on 82nd Street was charged with the anticipation of college, with the relief of knowing it was the final night living under my parents’ roof, and with the energy that underlies escapes of all kinds. The places I lived after my childhood and adolescence were a series of dorm rooms, apartments, rental houses (one was in North Dakota and it was a chicken coop converted into a tiny rental property). It was not until I reached the age of 43 that I felt completely and thoroughly at home in a dwelling. My husband and I bought a house in the city we had lived in, by this time, for many years — Minneapolis. I love this city to a degree that sometimes seems unhealthy, extreme, unbridled. I know the weather can be inclement here and the heterogeneity of the city sits on top of a lily-white Scandinavian base, but none of this makes a hoot of difference to me. It is my home. It is where I am more deeply rooted than any place in the world. Whenever I return to Minneapolis from a vacation and the plane is on its descent, I gaze out at the farm fields surrounding the city and at the rivers that flow like ribbons of water through towns and suburbs and the city itself. When I see the Mississippi from the air, I know I am home. I kiss a wall in the Minneapolis airport after I deplane. I force myself to conceal my giddiness: I am back in my favorite place on earth. I imagine this is how travelers feel when they arrive in Rome or Paris or some fascinating, exotic destination. For me, I get that rush of excitement when my feet touch the Minnesota ground.

And so, this house I have inhabited for 27 years, this house that embraces me every day, this house that I have tragically sold in my nightmares, is the one I get to describe to you now. It is neither large nor small. The exterior is smooth stucco, with brown and rust-red window trim. When I walked into the house in 1991, I felt for the first time in my life that I was home. It was more than the rooms, the woodwork, the light dancing through the beveled glass windows on either side of the mantel. It was separate from the specs on a spreadsheet that lay on the previous owner’s dining room table. I felt a chemistry with this house.

It has been a rare occurrence in my life that I have met a person with whom I had an instantaneous connection, a feeling that I had known this person before — as though we were two atoms in the same molecule. Being in instantaneous sync is a pleasure as great as any in a lifetime, that sense of finding a soul friend, or as John O’Donohue calls it, an anam cara or in Israel, a bashert. This is how I felt the day I walked into this house. I had found my home; my soul could relax, put its feet up finally and exhale.

My house, built in 1914, sits on a shady lot in the middle of the block. One hundred-yearold pines tower in the front and a huge maple tree stands tall in the back. We put in gardens bordered in brick everywhere we could. My husband might have been a farmer in another life; nothing made him happier than planting and taking care of the earth, the grass, the trees. Coming from New York City, I learned everything I know about gardening from him. He also loved old pavers and bricks, and he collected them from demolished building and road sites over the years. He used them to create a flat patio in the back under the maple and a hidden courtyard on the south side of the house, the walls formed by enormous arborvitae. After his untimely death in 2012, I changed the front gardens and used his pavers for borders. The land on which my house sits fills me with the same sense of solace and rightness as the inside.

This is my nest, my home, my refuge. The original front door of the house opens to an entry room with a coat closet and three walls of windows. Built-in shelves the height of the window sills hold the succulents and orchids I love to tend. It is a foyer, a greenhouse, a three-season porch all in one. The remainder of the main floor has a living room, dining room, kitchen and screened-in porch. The living room has a fireplace and built-in bookshelves; the dining room faces the hidden courtyard on the south — which is really like a secret outdoor room. All the spaces are punctuated with quarter-sawn dark oak of the Arts and Crafts period. We added the porch in 2004 and this is where I spend my summers. It is my Minnesota cabin without the commute. One day when the carpenter was hard at work building it, I asked him, How’s the porch coming? He replied, This isn’t a porch; it’s a fucking spiritual space. And he was completely accurate. In the summer, the porch is my favorite place to write.

My bedroom upstairs is L-shaped, lined with windows on three sides. Light pours in and the cross-ventilation is heavenly. I have a small office down the hall; it used to be a child’s bedroom, but I converted it long ago. There is another bedroom on the same floor; this one I made into an art and writing room. The evergreens outside hug the south window of the room, making it cozy and private.

I am surrounded by beauty in this house everywhere I turn: the woodwork, the built-in buffet and the bookshelves, the original windows, the way the light comes into the house. It is not the rooms themselves so much as it is the peace I feel here, the warm and sturdy energy coming from the architecture itself. I have placed art and special objects of all kinds in places where I can see them. I believe, at the risk of anthropomorphizing the house, that what I have placed in the house (the pottery, the paintings, the textiles, the flowers, the plants) feeds its soul. Yes, I believe this house has a soul; when all is quiet, I can feel it.

Compared to the places I lived in the first half of my life, this home is my only true one. I think I was always looking for it. The experience of living in homes that felt discordant, unsafe, foreign deeply affected me. On some level, I feared never finding a place, a space in which I would feel a sense of belonging. When I found Minnesota and this particular house, it was as if an impossible longing had been fulfilled. Even after the death of my husband, the person who also loved this space as much as I did, the house enveloped me, held me at a time I was plummeting. I have met many widowed people who sell their house as soon as they reappear from the stultifying first wave of grief. They cannot bear being in the home they shared with their now-deceased partner. I understand this conceptually, yet I could no more follow suit than a deeply rooted oak tree could relocate to the desert.

There is only one problem I have living here: I almost never leave. I just cannot seem to get enough of it. Even after 27 years, there is not a day that goes by when I do not appreciate the feeling of rightness I have here, the refuge that this house continues to be for me, the comfort and safety it provides. It is my lair, my habitat. I keep waiting for a zest for travel to hit me. It does not — unless I force it. I know it is important to leave home, if only for the exhilaration of returning, but it is hard for me to do. I have to rip myself away, like undoing Velcro, to make airline reservations to leave the state. I am a curious person — and I love to watch people. I would have been a natural traveler, perhaps, had I not needed this experience of home so intensely. The truth is, I rarely leave home, the city, the state. At other times of my life, I visited foreign countries and other parts of the United States — thank God. If I had not, I could be accused of being agoraphobic.

It is not at all the fear of leaving home that drives me to stay put. It is the solace, the beauty, the sense of well-being, the connection to place; this house is the truest home I have ever had. And so, you can imagine why my nightmare is so disturbing. In it, I have sold this house; I am having to let it go; I have made the worst mistake of my life; I must undo it; I must reverse course and convince all the people in the dream that this was an error of massive proportions, like selling your child or cutting off your feet. I suppose I will have the dream again before the year is out. But maybe by describing the homes of my childhood and placing them next to this miraculous one in Minneapolis, I will undo some twisted need my psyche has to commit self-exile a couple of times a year. I would like to move on to a different recurring dream, maybe one where I fall out of a helicopter, or one where I lose all my teeth, or one where I am being chased by terrible men and wild animals. But please, please, not another one where I have to beg and completely become undone by my own mistake of selling and having to leave the sweetest place I know on earth.