It was, as I have said, a very old house. Even when we took it age had marred it considerably. We had to replace certain window sashes and panes and fix the chimney and patch the roof in several places where it leaked. The stairs creaked. Being almost entirely surrounded by pines which sighed and whispered continually, it was supposed to be damp but it was not. In grey or rainy weather the aspect of the whole place was solemn, historic. In snowy or stormy weather, it took on a kind of patriarchal significance. When the wind was high these thick, tall trees swirled and danced in a wild ecstasy. When the snow was heavy they bent low with their majestic plumes of white. Underneath them was a floor of soft brown pine needles as soft and brown as a rug. We could gather basket upon basket of resiny cones with which to start our morning fires. In spring and summer these trees were full of birds, the grackle of blackbird particularly, for these seemed to preempt the place early in March and were inclined to fight others for possession. Nevertheless, robins, bluebirds, wrens and other of the less aggressive feathers built their nests here. I could always tell when spring was certainly at hand by the noise made by a tree full of newly arrived blackbirds on some chill March morning. Though snow might still be about, they were strutting about on the bits of lawn we were able to maintain between groups of pines, or hopping on the branches of trees, rasping out their odd speech.
But now, as we rolled out my familiar street, I noted that the sawmill was no longer. The furniture factory had been converted into an electrical supply works. Furthermore, the pond at the foot of our house was filled up, not a trace of it remaining, and all saw logs, of course, long since cleaned away. Worse and worse, the pine grove had disappeared completely. In the front or west part of our premises now stood two new houses of a commonplace character, with considerable lawn space about them, but not a tree. And there had been so many fine ones! Furthermore, the ground about the house proper was stripped bare, save for one lone crab apple tree which stood near our north side door. It was still vigorous, and the ground under it was littered with bright red-yellow crabs which were being allowed to decay. From the front door, which once looked out upon a long cobble and brick walk, which ran between double rows of pine trees to our very distant gate (all gone now) protruded a sign which read, “Saws Filed.” A path ran from this door southward over the very pond on which we used to skate! Near at hand was the “old Grant house” in which we had lived before we moved into this one, and it was still there, only it had been moved over closer to the school and another house crowded in beside it, on what was once our somewhat spacious lawn. The old school lawn, which once led down to the street that passed its gate, was gone, and instead this street came up to the school door, meeting the one which had formerly passed our house and ended at a stile, giving on to the school lawn. The school yard trees were gone, and facing the new street made of the old school lawn were houses. Only our old Thralls house remained standing as it was, on the right hand side.
I can only repeat that I was psychically wrenched, although I was saying to myself that I felt no least interest in the visible scene. I had lived here, true, but what of it? There was this of it, that somewhere down in myself, far below my surface emotions and my frothy reasoning faculties, something was hurting. It was not I, exactly. It was like something else that had once been me and was still in me, somewhere, another person or soul that was grieving, but was now overlayed or shut away like a ghost in a sealed room. I felt it the while I bustled about examining this and that detail.
First I went up to the old house and walked about it trying to replace each detail as it was, and as I did so, restoring to my mind scene after scene and mood after mood of my younger days. What becomes of old scenes and old moods in cosmic substance? Here had been the pump, and here it was still, thank heaven, unchanged. Here, under a wide-armed fir which once stood here, Ed, Al, Tillie and I had once taken turns stirring a huge iron pot full of apple butter which was boiling over pine twigs and cones, and also gathered cones to keep it going. Here, also, to the right of the front door as you faced west, was my favorite lounging place, a hammock strung between two trees, where of a summer day, or when the weather was favorable at any time, I used to lie and read, looking up between times through the branches of the trees to the sky overhead and wondering over and rejoicing in the beauty of life. We were poor in the main, and, worse yet, because of certain early errors of some of the children (how many have I committed since!) and the foolish imaginings of my parents, my father in particular, we considered ourselves socially discredited. We hadn’t done so well as some people. We weren’t rich. Some of us hadn’t been good!! But in books and nature, even at this age, I managed to find solace for all our fancied shortcomings, or nearly all, and though I grieved to think that we had so little of what seemed to give others so much pleasure, and the right to strut and stare, I also fancied that life must and probably did hold something better for me than was indicated here.
After I had made the rounds once, Franklin sitting in the offing in his car and sketching the house, I knocked at the front door and received no answer. Finally I went inside and knocked at the first inside door, which originally gave into our parlor. The place looked really very tatterdemalion, like an isolated Eleventh Avenue, New York, tenement. No one answered, but finally from what was formerly my sister Theresa’s room, on the second floor, a stocky and somewhat frowsy woman of plainly Slavic origin put her head over the balustrade of the handsome old carved walnut staircase, and called, “Well?”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, “but once, a number of years ago, our family used to live in this house, and I have come back to look it over. Can you tell me who occupies it now?”
“Well, no one family has it now,” she replied pleasantly on hearing of my mission. “There are four families in it, two on this floor up here, one on that floor (indicating) and one in the basement. The people on the first floor rent that front room to a boarder.”
“A tenement!” I exclaimed to myself.
“Well, there doesn’t appear to be anyone at home here,” I said to her. “Do you mind if I look at your rooms? The room at the end of the hall there was once my sleeping room.”
“Oh, not at all. Certainly. Certainly. Come right up.”