5 Maple Street

They're selling the house I grew up in, and today my mother and I went to see it. When I was 5 this was my bedroom window. It was my bedroom window when I was 14, too. I'm crying too much these days; everything feels acute.

There were ghosts in that house. I wondered if I'd still feel them, now that I'm grown and distracted. I climbed down into the basement to look for them, and could still smell the coal though the coal bin is long gone. Always hated that basement; that hasn't changed. Maybe they were floating there, behind the stairs. I didn't check.

Suddenly, a deluge of them: my mother pulling a needle out of my brother's finger up in the hallway; my father cutting a hole in the sheetrock to pull out the cat, who found a way in and got stuck; my brother hiding in the bottom of a closet when he was 2, all of us afraid and calling for him; me in the bathroom, listening to my mother crying because her best friend had died; a certain grate in the floor, and me sitting beside it listening again and again to a wind-up music toy; my father catching me practicing womanhood with click-clack high heels on the cement floor in the garage, telling me it took more than shoes to make a woman. On and on. My father built that house. I remember almost every board; back then I was Lovey the Carpenter--his stand-in son, until the real thing came along. That home was my haven.

Place matters. There's a lot tied up in it--in the nails and the space and the beams. Note to our heads of state.