The hickory tree in the front yard was dying.
Little stairsteps of fungus had sprung up, pulsing out of the roots and pushing through the pine straw at the base of the tree. The shelf mushrooms clustered all along the north side, spiraling around the trunk like a spine. Within a year of first noticing it, the invaders had already multiplied.
It was a large, mature tree (my guess is it was at least 80 years old, though may have been far older), giving shade to the whole front side of the house, including my corner room upstairs. Each year, we collected the hickory nuts, shelled, and ate them. We’d do a sort of harvest exchange with my grandmother (while her teeth could still tolerate nuts); we’d give her the nuts from our yard and she would share the bounty of scuppernongs (muscadine grapes) from the vine in hers.
This beautiful, bountiful hickory, standing tall in all the images of our home, had been a part of our lives for the entire time we’d lived there. Now both of these truths were coming to an end.
The death of this tree is not a metaphor for a household in decay, the seemingly healthy chlorophyllic canopy cloaking the rottenness festering inside. You won’t find a whole lot of dark secrets here; there was plenty of delight and joy and love in our home. Even with the expected misstep every once in a while (we’re all human), it was about as rosy a family life as one might hope for. So, in this case, a tree is just a tree.
But it means something now that it’s gone. Because we’re gone, too.
If I’m writing a newsletter about home, I should probably go back to the start.
It’s impossible to fully describe what I mean when I say “1202 Belt Line Boulevard.” It holds a space in my mind much bigger than a brick house, and more fleshed out than a simple address. It’s the place where my family spent nearly 40 years of our lives, the picture of “home” that popped into my head any time I’d say those familiar words: I’m going home.
I can only reply that I think–I theorise–that something–something else–happens to the memory over time. For years you survive with the same loops, the same face and the same emotions. I press a button…the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out.
–Tony Webster, A Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes
I press a button marked “home” and the usual stuff spools out–Christmas mornings, backyard games, playing with Playmobil and Legos in the den with my brother–a cascade of snapshots, both memorable and seemingly insignificant. I’m willing to bet that the same thing happens to you, too. When you think about your childhood home–whether it’s still in your life or not, whether it still exists or not–the usual stuff spools out.
My high school Drama teacher once said to me, You live in that big white house on Belt Line? Belt Line Boulevard was one of the main thoroughfares, a straight shot to the high school almost, and heavily trafficked. She (and who knows how many others) had seen my mom’s always identifiable car in the driveway. We always had easily identifiable cars, and not in the cool way. (Let me know if you want to hear more about the one dubbed “The Green Pickle”).
The thing that always struck me about this statement was that it presumed several things about the house–and subsequently, my family–that weren’t totally accurate. As you can see in the picture, the house wasn’t white. White trim, but clearly a brick house.
The house also wasn’t all that big, particularly when compared to the newer homes around the city. Clocking in at 1900 square feet, it was plenty of room, mostly, for a family of four, but not extravagantly spacious, or at least it didn’t seem so at the time. (I now live in a house much smaller than that, so 1900 SF sounds like a luxury these days)!
Still, from the outside, I could understand why she saw something that wasn’t there. Unless it’s your own house, you have no clue of what goes on in peoples’ homes. It’s a mystery.
Everybody has those quirks about their family and the ways in which their family home influences those quirks. Because I lived on a very busy road, I don’t mind the sound of traffic, the screech of cars speeding by at all times of the day or night. We also did not have cable TV, a dishwasher, a computer, or a VCR for years and years after most other people did. We did have five channels, a sink and sponges, a typewriter, and a Blockbuster down the street, where you could rent your own VCR to take home for two days, along with Back to the Future. We did just fine.
There was no true privacy in the house–none of the doors locked, not the bathrooms, not the bedrooms, and because it was an old house that was continuously “settling”, some of the doors didn’t really close all the way unless you slammed them. We had one full bath among the four of us, so it was nothing at all to use the sink while my brother was in the shower.
(Why does this have to sound weird now? It wasn’t actually weird then. It’s just what we had to do).
Because I grew up in an old house in hot old South Carolina, we had roaches all over the place; they were our (uninvited) roommates. Lest you think my family is disgusting, might I remind you that SC is in a sub-tropical zone. (The roaches came for me in Georgia, too). I know I just mentioned that our house didn’t hold many dark secrets, but I forgot these:
You’ve never known real fear until you’ve hid under the covers from a roach flying around your bedroom in the dark.
Heaven forbid you take a late-night trip to the kitchen, sans slippers. I can tell you exactly what a crunched, squished roach feels like stuck to the sole of your naked foot.
Superpower disclosure: I can spot a disembodied roach leg from across a bright room.
Me, confused: I keep licking this stamp and it’s not sticking. Mom, nonchalantly: Oh, the roaches eat the glue.
One time I went to our pantry and grabbed an empty water bottle that I hadn’t used in awhile. I filled it and drank from it throughout the day. When the water was gone, I shook the bottle, and there was an odd rattling sound inside. I peered in and saw that for hours, I’d been drinking water seasoned with the essence of roach egg.
I am almost certain that the tap-tap-tap of their six little legs skittering across a hardwood floor is a sound that will haunt my dreams forever.
So even though we had to lug home an entire VCR anytime we wanted to watch a movie, and the doors didn’t lock or even close all the way and that was super annoying, I can say proudly that I can handle a roach or two without freaking out.
Now that I’ve pumped you up about what might be lurking inside, let’s take a tour, shall we?
Entering through the back door across from the garage, the kitchen was the focal point of our daily lives, not because it was the centerpiece of elaborate meals, but out of necessity: all the food was there, and we needed that sort of thing every day. My mom actually detested cooking, and she was not an adventurous cook. I wouldn’t say that about my dad, either, but he at least seemed to glean some kind of joy out of the act of preparing an enjoyable meal.
We ate a lot of typical American fare: fish and rice, pork chops and applesauce, hamburgers in a cast iron pan with mushrooms and onions, all with a side of a vegetable: boiled squash, boiled cabbage, boiled Brussels sprouts. Just because food wasn’t seasoned too heavily (as my dad would often say, Butter, salt, and pepper; that’s all you need) didn’t mean it was bland, but we were pretty vanilla when it came to flavor. It was all fine, and I certainly miss some of that cooking, although I’ve learned how to prepare vegetables in tastier ways.
On late mornings, my mom would sit at the high-top kitchen island and read the newspaper, skimming the obituaries for her late parents’ friends, and then, for her own friends. It didn’t occur to me that there would come a day when I’d be sitting at that same table, reading hers. I can still hear the sound of my mom’s shoes–always flats, never heels–when she’d slip them off her feet and let them drop to the floor. It meant she had her paper, her Bojangle’s tea, and was settling in.
We only ate in the dining room on special occasions–Easter, Sunday dinners, when guests were over–and the whole room had that traditional, formal dining room feel, with a long, wood-paneled table, high-backed chairs, floral wallpaper, my grandmother’s china set and crystal on display in glass cases. That table had hosted many a gathering–at age 12, I started “catering” our Christmas Eve family shindig, planning everything from the recipes to the shopping list to mapping out the food placement and the order of the evening.
I see the table at age 28, where all my wedding presents were displayed at some kind of Southern party called a Sip and See, where women sip tea or wine and look at the different items we were gifted, including a dozen useless ornamental platters, half of which had to be given away.
And at age 37, where, dimly lit, my family sat, or what was left of us: my dad, my brother, and me, our spouses, and our two toddlers. The next day we would be disconnecting the ICU machines keeping my mom alive. We asked my dad to tell us the story about how he and my mom met. He told us that when he saw her for the first time, he was immediately charmed by her irresistible smile. Everyone was.
I always liked how elegant the living and dining room felt, both of which were bright and flowery and cheery. The living room was the place of Christmas mornings (we knew Santa existed because we had the right kind of fireplace), but the rest of the time it was Mom’s space, where she’d sit on one of the loveseats and peruse her catalogues and write letters. On a memorable September 22, 1990, we learned the hard way that loveseats are not ideal for spending a howling night, when Hurricane Hugo flew overhead and we all slept in the living room in case a tree came through the roof. That night, my brother and I sat by the front window, our faces pressed against the glass, the scent of white leaded paint in our nostrils, hoping to catch a glimpse of the dark swirling wind.
Adjacent to the living room was the den, adorned in the classic hunting-style decor, with deep green plaid wallpaper and wooden blinds, and framed prints of hunting dogs and ducks, quintessentially Southern. The den was where the TV was, so it was an important room, and the deep green couch was perfect for napping or doing homework. It was the most comfortable room in the whole house, and it’s where my brother and I did a lot of hanging out, and when friends would sleep over we’d lay out sleeping bags on the floor, surrounded by hulking bookshelves laden with old books about the Civil War.
My brother’s room–
Where reams of fabric
Stand in the corner,
Splashed with the image
Of a funky, hip California Raisin–
Donning sunglasses and doing the conga–
The colorful poly/cotton blend
Dust-gathering, ever-waiting
To become curtains
My well-intentioned mother
Would never make.
My room was next door–with the physical door having amassed over a hundred, maybe two hundred stickers. So many stickers, with the oldest ones right in the center, Gizmo and Stripe from Gremlins and a couple of Garbage Pail Kids, and the newer ones circling out of that nucleus to fill every available inch of space.
With that introduction, I tried as best I could to make my room my own sacred space. For the first several years, the floor was covered in a dusty, dusky blue wall-to-wall carpet, which irritated me more and more as time drew on. I’d had frequent nosebleeds as a child, and strangely never kept tissues by the side of the bed, so the carpet remained dotted with blood long after the nosebleeds had ceased. I suppose that was the impetus, around age 13, for me to take my own two hands and start ripping it out, years of dust mites and dead skin cells blowing up in my face with each furious yank.
I lived with the thing piled up in one corner for quite awhile–months, I’m sure–and with the exposed nails that had once held it fast guarding the perimeter of the room. I’d inform guests that they’d have to take a big step over the threshold to avoid getting poked. At some point, my parents helped me take the corpse of a carpet out to the dumpster. This was one of those times–like when I started dyeing my hair bright red, and my brother’s hair, too–when I thought I might get in trouble but was met with a mere shrug. My parents were strict about a lot of things, but they probably secretly hated that carpet, also. The hardwood floor was much nicer.
By high school, I had amassed a quirky collection of teenage paraphernalia that, surrounding me in my own little nest, made me feel a little more like myself. Whenever I’d sit down at my desk I had these three 8.5 x 11 collages of hot guys, pictures I’d cut out of YM or old copies of People: Leonardo DiCaprio, Eddie Vedder, lots of Jared Leto, Mighty Ducks actors, random male models, Prince William as a baby. On my wall was a bulletin board filled to the brim with doodles and stickers and sentimental objects: my favorite pictures of me and my best friends, friendship bracelets from years of summer camp, Mary Engelbreit quotes, luggage tags from trips to London and the Senior Cruise, a uniquely decorated spork (it was a theatre thing), and a really old stick of beef jerky that had been touched by my favorite camp counselor.
My brother and I had twin lamps that my dad had bought us after a trip to HQ–each one had three bulbs, and one of them was blue, just for fun. I would turn on that blue light when I needed to get into some kind of reflective mood, probably while listening to my Walkman. I always hoped that someone driving by the house at night would see that blue light emanating from my window and think, There must be a cool teenage girl in that room.
Above the bed was a black-and-white framed poster of a haunted house that I’d scored at a neighborhood yard sale. After I left for college, my mom started redecorating my room in the “Country French” style: lots of florals, bright yellows, and cornflower blues. I rather liked the shift, and while most of my personalized touches remained, the haunted house had to go. Too Gothic.
I slept directly across from the attic door, which was always peeking open, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. There’s not a whole lot to say about the attic, which was quite large and always 150 degrees, but the smell it emitted–mustiness, dustiness, old wood planks, clothes packed with cedar chips–remains in my olfactory vault.
The attic’s nemesis (each vying for “creepiest space in the house”), the basement, was clammy and cold. Two important things lived down there: one, our Christmas ornaments, and it was always a delightful day, preferably the day after Thanksgiving, when we were allowed to haul out box after box and start decorating for Christmas.
The other important thing was a toilet. Growing up, it was funny to see this funky old toilet sitting in the middle of the unfinished basement, gathering dust and welcoming spiders. It was connected to the plumbing and had been operable at some point before we occupied the house. It wasn’t until I read the book “The Help” that it dawned on me: the toilet had possibly been installed for servants to use. Looking around that uninviting space below ground, no one would enjoy the experience of having to go down there just to use the bathroom. After that realization, having a commode in our basement wasn’t funny anymore.
As weird as both the attic and the basement were, they were not to be outdone by the final space: the garage. Never used for cars due to its small size and a floor made of sand, it was another place to keep things: the lawnmower, bikes, camping gear. There was plenty of room in the rafters for storing hanging items, or where you could imagine snakes dropping from at any moment, one after another, Indiana Jones-style.
I never once saw a snake or evidence of a snake in our attic or garage, even though it was ingrained in me that they could be lurking around every corner, slithering across my feet, tickling my head from above. This fear made going into the garage always an experience in bravery–get what you came for, get out fast. One time, my mom spotted a skink (probably similar to this one) and she almost had a heart attack. Thinking it was a snake, or just because she was freaked out by such things in general, she attacked it. It barely escaped with its life, the poor thing. Didn’t you know, Plestiodon inexpectatus, that we had been expecting snakes for decades?
For a city backyard, ours was massive. It was essentially two backyards side by side, with plenty of space on the left for baseball games, and on the right, a swingset, treehouse, and a pockmarked Slip n’ Slide (too many twigs, too little grass). One autumn, we created a town in the whole backyard out of all the massive piles of leaves, gave names to the “streets”, and rode bikes to each other’s “houses” (a clump of bushes here, a cluster of trees there). I had spotted my mom’s library book about the Boer War, and I ended up naming one of the streets after it.
It was a place full of potential, sometimes realized, sometimes not so much. All through elementary school, my mom invited my class and my brothers’ class to our backyard for an Easter egg hunt. Though I never walked to school otherwise, I’d walk with my class the half mile to my house–my house!–and my mom would serve punch and my classmates would dart around, looking for the brightly colored eggs that I’d helped hide. There was always a secret spot I’d tell my closest friends about, a little hole at the base of a tree, a perfect egg-hiding spot.
And my brother dug a giant hole in a corner of the yard that we used to fill with hose water and slop around in. Years later, that’s where our beloved English Setter, Lady, was laid to rest.
After my mom died, my dad seemed to feel pretty swallowed up by the expanse of the house. It was far too large for one person, and much too quiet. All the years of children running up and down the stairs, a wife doing her reading in the living room, dinners at the kitchen island–all of that had been ghosted away, leaving just a shell behind. He needed to move on.
On a hot October day, I rented a U-Haul cargo van and drove the three hours from Athens, Georgia, east to Columbia to take with me what I could. My brother, stationed in Memphis at the time, also drove down, and together we combed through object after object. We could have taken weeks to pore over each photograph or scrap of paper or clipped theatre pamphlet belonging to my mom, sift through bags of Thundercats and other, lesser-known action figures from the ‘80s, debate whether each family heirloom was worth keeping.
We had one day.
I tried not to dwell in the gravity of those moments, and constantly remind myself that it wasn’t my responsibility to keep everything that belonged to her, or even everything she’d wanted me to keep. After all, it’s really all just stuff.
It’s just stuff. It’s just stuff. It’s just stuff.
I had to repeat this mantra to keep myself sane and shut out of my brain how much more I wanted to take. I grabbed just a couple of stuffies for my daughter, my Playmobil dollhouse, and yes, I absolutely regret not bringing my Cabbage Patch dolls now, but the dozens of Barbies, hair mussed and limbs greasy with time, I am okay without. The dresses my mom had bought two decades ago for a wish of a granddaughter had not aged well, and I resigned myself to taking just one or two, snapping a picture, and then letting them go.
My dad marked boxes of items that would be passed on to us at a later date, and I turned down some of my grandmother’s furniture but took her grandfather clock with me.
It would be the last time the three of us would be together in that house. I was in my old creaky bed in my old room, my brother right next door, my dad down the hall.
I like to think that we carried out this benediction in a healthy way, but there is still an ache; adults get growing pains, too.
Every few months I’ll look at the house on Google street view. Up until earlier this year, you could see that hickory tree in the yard, my parents’ car in the driveway, everything as it should be. Last time I checked, though, the view had been updated. There was a new car in the driveway and the diseased tree was gone, as if it had never been there at all. Changes only someone like me would notice.
I also regularly snoop at the Zillow listing from when it was on the market. While I have to admit that the updated sinks, blinds, and countertops are an improvement, it’s clear that the most work the developers did involved just a bunch of paint (and one uninspired and uninspiring chandelier). It’s understandable that they would make the minimal amount of upgrades to get it to a sellable place, but I can see through the pictures to wonder if they changed out the old outlets to those three-pronged ones, or remedied the lackluster water pressure. The vent in the shower is still there; I’m sure the new owners love being blasted with air while water runs over their heads.
I feel like these pictures are fake. The den looks nothing like that! My room is completely devoid of any identifying features, and they’ve tried to make it look bigger than it actually is! (And it’s beyond me why they’ve included a photo of the gaping abyss at the top of the basement stairs. Eek).
My favorite picture, though, is #11. It’s of the built-ins in the living room surrounding the front window, which had a green cushioned seat to sit on and gaze out into the yard and the street beyond. If you look closely at the second shelf to the right, there’s a tiny black mark on the underside. It’s where the flame of a Christmas candle once licked the shelf above, creating an upside-down crater. It’s like a little brand that says, Yeah, this is ours.
I would have mentioned this at the beginning if I had a better telling of it, but apparently the previous owner of the house died at the top of the stairs. Along with hospitals and nursing facilities, home is where most people die. Other than the creepy feeling I’d get at night when I’d walk past the top of the stairs, turning my face so I couldn’t see the blackness at the bottom, it wasn’t so strange; we never saw anything.
The house wasn’t haunted when we lived there, but there are ghosts there now.
1202 Belt Line now belongs to another family, with their own furniture, their own lives. But it’s still a part of us. I don’t have to close my eyes to see the whole: the smells, the noises, exactly how it was, exactly how it should be.
My room, every room, unchanged. My memory is the truth; those photographs on Zillow are the lie. A house lovingly filled with sentimental items, my grandfather’s Civil War books, my grandmother’s china, my great-grandparents’ silver service. Those objects, filling up the rooms like rainwater, drop by drop, until the pail is overflowing. There was comfort in all those objects littering the insides, because our hands had put them there.
The scent of old paint on a window pane, sniffed at close range.
The plain flavors of Butter, salt, and pepper; that’s all you need.
A thousand hugs, tuck-ins, laughs, goodnight kisses.
The rustle of the obituaries, and the echo of a women’s size 7 shoe dropping to the floor.
Reflection questions:
I wrote, Everybody has those quirks about their family and the ways in which their family home influences those quirks. What are yours? What can you live without that others may have a harder time tolerating?
What did your childhood bedroom look like? What were 1-2 of the objects in your room that were most essential to your identity?
Is your childhood home still a part of your life? If not, what feelings do you have about that?
1202 Belt Line is located in present day Richland County, South Carolina, on the land of the Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East) and Congaree nations.
Image: The last photo of my family in front of the house, Fall 2019.