hullo friends! Happy March, the longest, weirdest month of the year. This time has been one of the strangest of my life as my partner and I navigate buying our first home, something I felt sure I’d never be able to do. More to come on that in the future, I’m too scared to jinx things right now.
If you have ever read any creation myth (or listened to Closing Time which is not not a creation myth now that I think of it), you know that every new beginning has a corresponding ending. I am really feeling into the end of my time in my current home, which we’ll be moving from in the summer regardless, and that is what today’s essay is about.
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this old house
The morning is quiet and bright, a 50-degree day in February’s last week. We have been shifting towards the sun again and you can finally tell. Outside the first flowers are popping up, bright yellow, white, and purple and they are both familiar and surprising every single year. This has been my last winter in this little city home. I have found comfort here, been happy in this house from 1865 with its angled floors and wonky additions. It has the quality of cartoon homes in the way that it has been stacked together, and if you place a pencil on the floor of the living room in just the right spot, it will roll down through the dining room, over the step, and through the kitchen. I guess it’s funny to feel so grounded in a place with such questionable foundations. But it is the first place where my love and I merged our things and made something new. It is a space of beginnings and that is what I love most about it, even as my time here is ending.
In the first months after we moved in, Max, my late-night internet sleuth, found the name of the original family who lived here. We went to the old cemetery up on the hill and found stones marked with their names, covered in mint green lichen. We left red flower and thanked them for the house. When we turned to walk back to the car there was an entire family of deer laying and grazing in the dappled sunlight of the cemetery’s edge. We stared at them and they stared at us. A good omen. That mutual, time-stopping stillness remains one of the most enchanted moments of my life.
And so the little green house with its little green porch became ours for a time, gifted by benevolent spirits and peaceful deer. It was a comfort through much of the pandemic, a home from which I can walk to almost anything that I need, including the sound of the rushing creek. It’s the first place I have felt at home since before I knew that this home feeling is something that can be lost.
Of course, as happens so much of the time, the more used to it we became the more we could see its flaws. We are always most critical of the things we love. But I have always been sure of this house, even when it has made me nuts. When the millionth chapstick rolled under the ancient tub, down the inclined floor of the always-damp, impossibly configured bathroom, I still loved it. This house has taught me the joy of the crooked, the old, the out-of-date. It has taught me what it means to bend to the will of something outside of myself and to adjust to my surroundings instead of seeking control all of the time. As I learned about myself and who I was becoming, I was also learning which corners gathered dust, which gathered spider webs, and which cabinets were simply not worth opening.
And the magic too. The way the light through the back windows in the morning is the most beautiful I have ever seen. The black walnut tree out front standing sentinel and the built-in corner cabinet that holds items given to us by our grandmothers. It has been our first home together, where Max learned to crochet and became obsessed with railroads and early British history. It’s where we both started our books. It’s where I made my first tincture, planted my first garden, and made my first altar. We have cooked countless meals here, baked countless cakes, and been through surgery, illness, recovery. I have cried in this house and I have laughed in it like I have laughed in none other. It has been the tenderest of nests, a place to land and begin to weave a future. A dreaming place.
One day, we will remember this house through the shiny filter of nostalgia. We’ll remember the summer when we both lost our jobs and the mixture of fear and joy that these walls held. The way the afternoon light in the bedroom is perfect for napping, and how the house held us through every single feeling. We’ll remember how the bedroom was at the top of the steepest of steps and how going down them felt like falling, the sounds of the sirens from the firehouse down the block, and how it felt to sit on the front porch when spring came and everything around us was green and new. The first night that we were here we slept on an air mattress in the living room, ate pizza, and watched Romeo and Juliet on a stack of moving boxes, so thrilled to be together at last in a place that could be ours.
I will miss this house. For everything that it is and everything that it steadfastly refuses to be. I will miss it for who I became here, and who I left behind. May each and every one of you have a Fayette Street.
Assorted, rad thing(s):
A section of this newsletter where I share what I have been reading, watching, or otherwise consuming lately.
Gender Reveal with Lucy Sante (podcast): This episode introduced me to Lucy and her work. I always really enjoy Tuck’s interviews, and this is a great one. On Bohemia, writing memoir, the history of New York, and being a late bloomer. She dropped the deeply relatable quote “I am susceptible to projects” about navigating her gender as a writing project when she couldn’t otherwise access it. Also. Did I also absolutely bawl through the memorial section with clips from Cecilia Gentili? I sure did. I grew up in the Catholic Church and hearing St. Patrick’s claimed and filled with queer and trans joy (those acoustics were not meant for straights, sorry!) was a balm to my heart. You can donate to her legacy fund here.
Live It Up green powder: I rarely recommend a capital-P Product, but I started using this last week and have noticed that I have more energy and feel generally better. Is this placebo effect? Maybe! Probably! But that is also good enough for me.
Excuse how light this week’s rad things is, I have been reading but I wouldn’t recommend what I have read so I am leaving it out. I’m also in the process of finishing my final project for my herbalism course so expect my reading to resume with more rigor in April!
Also! I will be traveling through the Southeast this Spring and I need your Southern writer recommendations! Any genre welcome!
with love,
lisa
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thank you Fayette Street for holding my friends. I use the name Reed when I order coffees and take away food. It's the street name of the very first home I ever knew. Precious spaces.