That old house Finding a home where you never lived BY TANYA WHITON

I’ve had many opportunities to return to places I once lived, to prowl the perimeter of houses in which I spent a year or two, searching for traces of my life there, or, more accurately, seeking entry back into the particular feeling I had when I inhabited them. These sentiments are attached to tangible details: glowing smoked glass globes on streetlights; cool tiled floors and the smell of overripe figs; books falling from shelves in a mild tremor; pine branches raking against my winter coat. The impossibility of being readmitted to the past is one my mind has never readily accepted. Even now, I fight against that dull knowledge, holding out hope that I will someday achieve a sense of continuity; that various pieces of my history will come together to make a whole.

Even more difficult than attempting to recapture the atmosphere of a former residence and the community that surrounded it is trying to convey the time spent there to someone else. My transient’s memory is shifty, unreliable, prone to conflate facts and elide connecting details. I get frustrated, unable to create a cohesive story, one that will convince another person to witness a fact I myself sometimes have trouble believing: I lived here ¾ in a suburb of Washington, DC; a duplex villa in Italy; a tiny hilltop house in Yokosuka, Japan; a Downeast Maine fishing village. Some part of this was mine.

It’s ironic, then, that one of the places I feel to be most familiar is a place where I never actually lived: the now-swanky South Shore town of Duxbury, Massachusetts. In a shaggy Cape at the end of Mayflower Lane off Bay Road, my grandparents lived in what to me was a state of exhilarating dishevelment. Every room of that house is etched in my brain, every feature of the surrounding land, from powdery anthill dirt out back to maple leaf spinners dotting the walkway. At various ages, in between stations, my parents and I would go to Duxbury, and I would feel anchored. The routines and peculiarities of that house were unchanging, the clutter and eccentricity: my grandmother’s penciled notes ¾ "Thieves, this is not sterling" in the cutlery drawer ¾ my grandfather’s piled-high desk with a framed photo of a cow and an ancient rotary phone.

They’re gone now, and the house belongs to some other family, who’ve built a fence around the property, but otherwise left it (at least the outside) the same.

"You know, I’d like to go over there some time, and just say, I lived here," my cousin Katherine said at Thanksgiving this year. "Let me in." She and her husband live just a half-mile away, with two kids of their own. I stopped stirring the creamed onions and stared at her. I’d always envied her permanence, her ability to answer the question of where she was from with a single town. Her memory of events is nearly photographic compared with mine; she’s had the same friends since elementary school. It never occurred to me that she might have that same feeling, of being shut out of her own past, that I fought against every time I returned to a place I once knew.

"I mean, what would they say?" she continued, her six-month old on her hip. I remembered a conversation we’d had with my grandfather, when I was 11 and she was nine. We’d made an obstacle course in the front yard, and after several hours of hopping over cricket wickets and other objects in our swimming flippers, we found my grandfather napping in his giant red chair and informed him that we wanted the house. It seemed urgent that he know this, that he make arrangements, right then. It hadn’t hit us that what we were talking about was a future in which he would not be present, or that the way we felt about the house was attached not to the objects in it ¾ though they were a source of fascination ¾ but to him. His magic was simple: He gave everyone permission to be themselves, without judgment, without expectations. He was the emperor of ice cream. All the landmarks of a community I otherwise had little familiarity with were somehow connected with him: cranberry bogs and captain’s houses, the landing, post office, and grocery store.

My cousin Matthew’s daughters were tugging on my shirt to get me outside for soccer, and so, in the way that conversations kaleidoscope around little kids, our discussion about the house morphed into resolving a heated debate about whose team I was to be on. Later, walking down a darkened road edged with cottages (that one used to belong to us, and that one, my father said, hands in his pockets) I asked Katherine why she never went back to the old house, why she didn’t just knock on the door.

"Well, I have my own life now," she said.

"But you live here," I replied, uncertain even as I said it exactly what I meant.

"I do," she said. "We’re in the newcomers club. I’m on the board."

This notion, of being a newcomer to your own hometown, was so disorienting to me that for a moment, my brain seized, and I felt sure that our childhoods were simply a thinly veiled presence beneath the flow of linear time, as though you could peel back a corner of photographic paper and there we would be, underneath. As though everything I saw was a mirage.

The next day, after turkey sandwiches and pie, I asked my dad to go for a tour. We drove past where my grandparents’ farm had been, past a knoll of woods that my dad had asked him to keep, and then suggested they sell when retirement funds were low. We passed by the mansions on Powder point; acres of land that had once belonged to great-great Uncle Harry ¾ who, my dad said, sold off a bunch of original shares of General Motors for next to nothing ¾ and we stopped at the town landing to survey the choppy water where my grandfather’s boat, Bluebell, had once been moored.

Finally, we turned down Mayflower Lane, and drove to the end.

"Looks the same," I said, and my dad nodded, his face neutral.

"Yeah-up, haven’t done much to it," he said, and angled the car up a neighboring driveway, backed up, and headed away from a place neither of us could revisit: torn porch screens, sharpening wheel in the basement, an electric razor’s hum. He turned up the stereo in his new sporty car, Jerry Lee Lewis singing heartbreaking country in a voice reminiscent of George Jones.

"Sounds like he’s lost his sleaze," I said.

"Oh no he hasn’t," my dad said, giving me a mischievous look. He scanned backwards through the song list, stopping at number three, and hit play.

"Hello, honey," Lewis drawled, "what’s that? Well, come on over here . . ." After listening to a few minutes of lubricious piano playing, I had to agree. I thought about how yet another odd piece of experience had layered itself over my memory of the place: Jerry Lee Lewis’s rendition of "Chantilly Lace" hammered over the trees seen through fog, bursting through my father’s carefully maintained distance from sentimentality.

"I’ll burn it for ya," he said, climbing out of the car, and we stepped back into the present, unraveling itself every second from the past.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com