My Grandmother's house was in Amityville, Long Island. It is still strange for me to think that she does not live there anymore. That I do not have another home there. That her death was many years ago and that with it came the loss of that house.
Her home was on a canal. It was a red home, with one tree in front, two in back. One being big enough to attach a plastic tire swing that my cousin and I utilized regularly, the other being my favorite, a weeping willow that eventually was removed because its roots were poisoned by their steady and thirsty intake of salt water. There was a hydrangea bush. And a boat dock that for most of my childhood housed a blue and white sailboat called the Amy O that I rarely went on, never being much of a natural water type girl. In that canal I remember jumping off the boat dock when the water was high and being somewhat terrified each time that my feet would touch the bottom, where the mud and the slime and the unknown lay. In that canal my Grandmother's dog Derby died when he wandered one night, old and nearly blind, into it. My Grandmother jumped in after him, strong woman that she was, and tried to save him but could not get his flailing, heavy, slippery body back onto land. In that canal the boats, motor boats, of the boys my cousin and I flirted with, kissed and were frequently pressured into doing more with, watched for during the summers, would pass by, as aware of us as we were of them.
At the end of my Grandmother's block, only one house away, was the bay. The house that divided my Grandmother and the bay belonged to a large woman named Gene French who wore mu mu's and turbans, had a solarium type room reserved exclusively for an extravagant Christmas tree and scene, and who frequently made appearances for many years in my dreams. Always the same. Always in her home, where a small clear stream containing small shimmering fish all made their way through her living room.
Many other things that still exist like time travelers in my current life, my real life, can bring me back there, too. Wrigley's spearmint gum and the combination of pretzels and ginger ale and the first explosion of a raspberry placed on my tongue and closed in on. But the heat and the fans are the strongest.
Amityville was hot and humid in the summer. There were fireflies warm thunderstorms and muggy nights. Sleepless nights. Nights spent tossing and turning tucked away in the upstairs of house where the mustard brown carpet was the same one my uncles walked upon in their own youth. The fans only stirred the dead and heavy air. The open windows only let in more heat and the sound of crickets and the occasional lustful and awkward whispered shouts of an adolescent boy below, sometimes answered, sometimes not. Sleep always came eventually but it was a hard fought battle replete with many false alarms.
It is not unusual for me even now, so very much later, while drifting in and out of restless sweaty sleep or waking up to a cooler morning and the sounds of fans competing and complimenting each other like dueling pianos, to think for a second that I am there, in my Grandmother's house in Amityville, and not here. Here across the country in Portland. Here across the decades of self.
Other than photographs, this is how I know I was once a child, once an adolescent. Once someone other than who I am now. These disorienting moments of transportation, of world straddling and time jumping and place dwelling in places that no longer exist.
These moment are precious to me. More precious in their re-experiencing than they ever could have been in real time.
I believe that is the power of all memories. To connect us to our former selves and the places and people that together compromise them. To make us realize that we are each of us contained in this very moment, an entire universe.
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