Been Thinkin’ About…the memory chickens

"Your house is like going to Grandma's in the '90s," my friend is saying, and I'm not sure if I should be amused or insulted. I tend to curate friends who speak their mind. And the eclectic collection of porcelain chickens in the kitchen stare down in an affirming manner. 

I used to imagine the sort of stark, classy bachelor pad I might own when I was all grown up, a place with lots of imposing stone and dark wood and art deco stylings. The 1930s' architecture of our state parks was one inspiration but, to be honest, I was likely just trying to build a house around my Star Wars and Metropolis posters. I was a young pup back then, unaware of the cost of building art deco fortresses. On one cloudy afternoon some 15 years ago, a convenient existential crisis in Lowe's kitchen department snapped me into reality when I realized I probably couldn't afford a kitchen, let alone the house to go with it.

It was early June, now some 13 years ago, when I moved into my house up on the hill in Hollister. To be fair, the house was not the one I imagined from earlier days, and we're not even talking about the art deco fortress. No 15 acres of forest, no barn, no wrap-around porch, heck, barely even a porch, but the house was, for the most part, sturdy, surprisingly new and even affordable. I was buying on the heels of one of the greatest economic recessions of our time and houses were, briefly, able to be purchased at a fraction of the price they are now. I don't consider such things lightly.

But my first home also came on the heels of my mom's death, which occurred in early July the year before. I had always loved Independence Day, but the whole month has now often filled me with some sort of unspoken dread as I steel myself against the memories I know are sure to come. As July is nearly here again, such memories remain raw.

But with the first home came the question of what on earth was I going to put in it? Some basic furniture, sure. And my books. All of my books. But the house remained plain and unmemorable for a couple of years. It wasn't really like I had time to decorate, or much money to do so. Then, some nine years ago — and nearly on the anniversary of my mom's passing — word came from my dad. He was getting remarried. The house I grew up in would be sold. Whatever was there in the house was there for the taking, with a couple weeks' deadline before the sentimental cosmos of my — and my sisters' — early years would be thrown in a dumpster. Loss has a certain sadism to it.

We complied into something resembling a makeshift reunion; a reunion missing the one person who had created all the sentiment, all the nostalgia, all the love. I don't remember the weekend with as much distaste as I might, but I don't remember the weekend fondly either. And to walk, at long last, through an alien landscape, the disheveled remains of my life and family once alive, is a memory I prefer not to often revisit. I was the last of us to leave and the floor creaked weirdly in the back of the house, old ghosts with no place to go. The memories cried, but only with half-voices. 

The result was a lot of the things that would have been otherwise thrown away ended up in my house. The result was a young bachelor's pad filled with his mom's stuff. So the "grandma's house in the '90s" thing is probably more accurate than somebody as cool as me would like to admit. It doesn't really bother me. I know I'm not cool. But now my house serves as a humbling reminder that the future is often not what we plan it to be. And ghosts come in many shapes and sizes.

"Just photograph the object and then get rid of it," came later advice, this time from a past colleague without a soul. "The reason we have things is for their memories and the photograph will do the same thing." Not untrue in that our memories do reside with objects. But what a soulless thing to say. A flat and emotionless image will only go so far. And memory is a strange thing, especially for me. Objects serve as something of a filing system, filing to a fully realized cosmology — the moment, the experience, the touch, the feel, the sound of a voice. It is why some objects cannot stay in my house. And why so many others remain.

Only the idea that my whole cosmological construct will one day end up in something resembling an estate sale or a landfill touches me with preemptive sadness. Others, my own kin, should know the stories, as I know them. Someday their houses should be cluttered too, cluttered with what makes a house a home, connecting past with present, a tether our own people who have gone on before. Ownership is important. More important than we are led to believe these days.

"Your house is homey," another friend is saying and I believe him. What the future holds, I do not know. If anything has held true on my predictions of the future, it is that I cannot predict the future. But here, in the only house I've ever owned, I overlook the Basset fur that slowly coats, well, everything, and find a certain solace in joy that things are more than things, that memory is real, and even in loss there is still the continuation of life and joy. I don't think I would have been happy in that stark art deco fortress I imagined all those years ago anyway. I think I would have been very lonely.

My mom's eclectic collection of porcelain chickens stares down at me in the kitchen as if in agreement and my pups paw for attention. Their water bowl is empty again.