Susan Sterling
Taking Apart the House
On an unseasonably warm Saturday in late February I spent the afternoon alone in the house where I’d lived from the age of eight to eighteen, and where my parents had lived for forty-one of the fifty-two years of their marriage. My mother had died seventeen months before. A little over a year after her death my father remarried and moved in with his new wife. He put our family home on the market; a for sale sign hung now from a post on the front lawn. The day started out still, but as the afternoon wore on, a wind came up, and packing boxes in my brother’s old room, I could hear the sign flapping in a lonely way. It’s a strange thing, dismantling your parents’ home. As common as the experience must be, I found myself unprepared for the ways in which it invaded my feelings and dreams for most of that winter and spring. Although as it turned out I walked through the rooms once more in June, the day of the closing, I believed, that afternoon in February, that I was in my childhood home for the last time. There was little occasion for reflection. And yet I felt a real urgency, a need to choose well, for I knew that what my brother and sister and I didn’t take would be given away to charity or tossed out. Already my father had thrown away the family slides and home movies and the letters written to our family after my mother died. He had, in fact, taken very little with him into his new marriage and was now, anyway, in Mexico for two weeks. My sister and I stayed in the house the previous night. Our brother had come up for a few hours, and the three of us made final lists of family possessions, which our father would ship to us later. Saturday morning my sister and I divided up our old collection of foreign dolls, still arranged in a glass cabinet in the bedroom we once shared. We visited our mother’s grave and then I returned to the house by myself. I opened all the windows. Outside, green was pushing up in the garden, and occasionally I could hear birds twittering, as if it were already spring, and in the distance, traffic, and then the hum of the refrigerator. Mostly, though, the house was empty of sound. All her life my mother, who disliked silence, had kept at least one radio on, often two or three, 228 ◆ Crab Orchard Review