"Revisiting Your Saved Homes"

Every week I get an email from Zillow with the above subject line. It always gives me a jolt. We all have our private private lives, our deep mental spaces that we wander around in without anyone seeing or knowing. I have reserved such a space for my saved homes, and I revisit it often. I miss houses as much as I miss people. Those I have loved are deep and abiding passions; it hurts not to be there. But I have my imagination, and can go, at least in the way of a mediation.

The house I go to most is my grandparents Cape May house. It seemed like the house of a successful man, which my grandfather was, though his shore house was modest compared to the houses of men of his position these days, and modest compared to the houses that surround it now—the complicated, entowered and enterraced and endless behemoths built all around his on lots that were empty during his lifetime. His high salary as president and CEO was $150,000, and he didn’t believe in making more than that. Enough was enough. My grandparents house was plain, with flaking wicker furniture, glassy sand in the bedsheets, red iron in the water, and my favorite, whistling wind in the porous windows even on clear days. I recorded that wind to listen to over the winters away. In those days the beach houses weren’t winterized and the summer parts of town went to sleep on Labor Day.

I also go to my grandparents’ house in Haverford. He built it on a street that was just developing right before the depression. There are pictures of dray horses dragging loads of Pennsylvania fieldstone to the site. I think of him, only twenty-five years past having to leave school at eight to support his family, now building his own solid house that could only be taken away by his own old age. How brave it was of him to build his own house. My grandmother decorated once and then never changed a thing except the occasional replacement of slipcovers. I revisit this house for its absolute predictability. I would walk over after school and there was my grandmother, always in a suit and stockings unless she was coming from golf, always ready to serve tea from two pots and cookies from a china plate. When we sold the house I went through it a last time and made certain I’d memorized everything in every place. When I want to focus, I first go through the house room by room, picturing where everything was. Those things are scattered now, many gone, most never to be seen by me again. But I have it in my mind. When I can’t remember, that will be a sign to me that I’m on my way out.

Some years ago I came across pictures of the house I grew up in. It was on sale for the first time since it was sold when my father died, and it was shocking to see those rooms again. Very little had been changed at all, and I was able to verify my memories. I kept those pictures but haven’t looked at them again. Another story for another day, but it was a nice house.

As a teenager I lived in my step-father’s house, a modern house with built in furniture and a huge glassed living room overlooking the pretty property. I was quite miserable there and never think of it.

The sale of the house in Maine is too recent for me to feel anything but pain about. The first year after I forced myself to drive by. Last summer I was given a full tour by the present owner who loves it to a consoling degree. But I want everything back, my mother there and younger, and me writing in the small upstairs bedroom that hung above the harbor, looking down from the page at the ducks, the blue heron, and the seals.

We are trying to decide where to move for the next phase. Zillow, please find me a house that surrounds me with the past.